Progress and Brief Hiccup

Just coming back from Meg and I's honeymoon. The wedding went off without a hitch! 

a couple weeks ago I was doing a little bit of tuning to one of our main production machines and while in a program I watched it jettison the end of the ballscrew through the back of the machine (It was in our insta stories if anyone wants to follow those I post all of our Whoopsies there). The good news is I had just finished a large production run and was shipping out 95% of the orders in the queue. The bad news is I was expecting to run product pretty much all the way up to our wedding and this machine doesnt even have spare parts in germany where its made. Unfortunatly this is one of the few critical spare parts I didnt have on hand yet.

To solve this problem without a solution I found the only other machine like mine that I could find in the states and purchased it. My best man and I drove over 1000 miles to the east coast to go and get it from connetucut about 4 days before the wedding. The bad news is I ran out of time to get the machine repaired in time before our Wedding day. and the honeymoon directly followed it. This left a few orders left to get done and the orders that came in delayed. Also since the shop is usually mainly occupied by me I dont let it be known when I am away from it for shop security reasons and past experiences that have taught me not to do so.

This put things in a difficult spot where we now have the ability to resume production with only a day of repairing out equipment but not the ability to produce product for a bit until now. So to the orders that have been affected by this delay (most order #s between 4443-4479 and the very few that were still in queue before that) I have an email going out tomorrow with several options that they can choose which they prefer and email back which one they wish. to the orders from now until the 15th which will se a smaller delay I am extending a sale of 15% off site wide. and we are throwing in bottle openers and free product in every other order as well.

Meg has been so understanding, helpful and patient with UC. she already let me cannonball off to the coast right before the wedding lol. I turned and focused on the wedding and doing all the things that entailed (we did much of our own flowers and woodwork for the wedding to make it our own). If you do it right you only do it once!

Thank you all for your your continuous support and Well Wishes!

-Travis

P.S. Breif more technical state of the union. For those who like these sorts of things.

The production side of the shop has been running at an all time high. new product dev has been slow due to developing work flows. we hired on help but learned that that wasnt the only solution needed. still we fall behind our projected schedule every once in a while. one of the biggest hitches just got solved with the addition of in process probing cycles (being able to locate and reference workpieces in our machines while unattended within our programs). this improves accuracy and my attention span throughout the day (currently I can run about 4 machines simutaneously but not do much else). with the addition of this we can now add our automated loading systems which have been slowly brewing in the backround. Which further frees me up to do more things. The robot army is ever growing!

the offending part that broke^

engagement photos of us^

Charly (best man) on our way to CT to get replacement machine... We both took turns doing this.