… another 14 L1s on monday/tuesday – just awaiting a new, high density packing material & drip trays to return from the polishers
just which 14 orders they are going to go against i don’t currently have visibility of, which probably reads like a process that is out of control, but that’s kind of how the relationship between Fracino & Londinium works; we don’t dictate what they build. if they want to build all the 110V machines first, they do. if they want to do the machines with the L-R switch first, they can. etc. it is essential that they have this autonomy in order to generate the necessary efficiencies – they can’t build the machines in the sequence in which they were ordered unfortunately
the goal for us is to catch up and have stock on the shelf so we can ship the most popular configurations the same day, but as things stand that day is some time away as the queue isn’t getting any shorter just yet, so getting on top of things is going to have to come from the supply side, not the demand side
one of the reasons why production is slower than it ultimately will be is Fracino wisely insisted on not making components in their hundreds or thousands until we were sure that everything worked as well as we hoped it would. one area where things didn’t work as well as they were meant to was our initial packaging design. because we hadn’t had a run of hundreds or even thousands of packaging components made it meant we could ditch the first design for minimal cost and order slightly different materials and sizes. the only cost being the lead-time for the new materials to arrive
we have run through this loop several times. the machines shipping next week will have a retaining clip on the anti-vac valve on the boiler to stop any residual water in the boiler leaking from the anti-vac valve. we have also seen a small amount of water leak from the thermosiphon & heat exchanger from the 4 entry ports in the group sleeve – this isn’t something we have a solution for yet
removing the top half of the group has been an outright winner in two respects; it has all but eliminated the shipping damage and leaks and secondly, something which we didn’t foresee, all customer feedback suggests that customers have actually enjoyed having some involvement in mounting the top half of the group in place and getting to see the heft of the piston & spring assembly first hand
the polystyrene we used initially was of standard density, the idea being that it provided high levels of cushioning. But in reality this material compressed, and as it has a memory, the internal space in which the machine resides effectively ‘grew’, allowing the machine to move around inside the packaging – we are only talking about millimetres, but it is enough to create momentum and then the machine starts to destroy itself ‘inside the box’ as it were
in the last few shipments we have moved to 150% density polystyrene and this has improved things out of sight. this week we move 3 density grades above that, my objective being to eliminate damage to the side panels if the box is lying on its side and the courier steps on it in the back of the truck – that’d never happen i hear you say? oh yes it does! we are building a packaging system which is all but bomb proof. I’m still kicking myself that we didn’t remove the top half of the group from the very start, but hey, that’s life i guess
what the higher density polystyrene does is spread the focused force at the point of impact over a much wider area, and in doing so reduces the magnitude of the force at any single point on the machine. assuming the force isn’t of a magnitude that will crush any package, if you can spread this force over a wide enough area you can eliminate the damage. taking the top half of the group off the machine greatly reduces the loading on the structure of the machine in the event of the machine being dropped, for example, which i would say happens many times on its journey around the globe. as it stands the packaged machine easily withstands being dropped from truck deck height onto a concrete floor, and i think that is a fairly significant achievement
my target is a 2% damage rate and i think we now have a packaging system that will allow us to achieve that. there is absolutely no correlation between distance travelled and damaged suffered either, which is a nice way of saying i think couriers in the UK are some of the roughest in the world
Tom, Mikel, & Ian – you are our number one priorities this week – i appreciate that it has been a long wait & i thank you for your patience as I’m not sure i would have been so understanding if the boot was on the other foot
reiss.