SUPPLY (BALL AND) CHAINS
Thank goodness the supply chain issues that have eaten our lunch during June are finally getting sorted out. Our Polymagnets finally arrived Thursday afternoon and the first batch of XL Caps shipped Friday. After a full production weekend another big group is going tomorrow and we hope the balance of orders are out latest Wednesday. This is a perfect example of Murphy’s Law. When something can go wrong it will. And it will go wrong in the worst possible way at the worst possible time. We placed the order for the magnets with a June 8th delivery from China. They arrived close to June 8th at the Polymagnet facility but once they arrived we found out that they were NOT YET polarized. The magnets are amazing and I suppose thats because Polymagnets keep the magnetizing process secret and do it themselves. We did not build that delay into our timing this time around. After magnetizing the magnets were shipped to us from Minnesota “next day” air. Next day turned out to be more like 3. To rub some salt into the wound the 50 emergency pieces we ordered from their web site to be delivered by regular mail actually arrived ahead of the Rush Courier. We are buying significant inventory of all outside sourced items so we can avoid this inconvenience for you in the future.
Our CopperCore oven process improvements have also yielded great results. We got the first 250 of our next production run out of the oven on Friday. I set them up on the lathe for first operation yesterday. We ran the first 25 to assess quality and get a jump on an important dealer delivery going this week. I’m thrilled to say that we had a 100 percent success rate - at least on the first 25. No voids, pock marks, pimples or other unsightly blemishes. Getting the reliability up on the oven process has been a critical to succeed for us. We anticipate that once we re-stock later in the week we won’t have any more outages.
INTEGRATED STEM
The integrated/simplified stem is now in full production. The units coming off the line are 99% the same as the sample above. Late Tuesday we are taking the first batch to electro-polishing, 48 hour turnaround, and they should appear on the site by the end of the week.
Cheers
John