McKenzie Penworks
Member
Wow... I had NO idea what I was getting myself into a few years ago when I agreed to take over the LaserLinez kits. It's been quite the learning experience between dealing with thousands of small parts for inventory, learning how to quickly finish those small parts, etc. Nothing quite prepared me for how hard it would be to get those parts made again when the original designer decided to stop making them for us.
We've had 2 false starts with machine shops that either gave up or in one case just disappeared on us... LOTS of "no quotes" Quite a few "$35 per part" quotes that would put the pen kit cost north of 300 I think... etc. It was so bad I was pricing out our finishing equipment, etc with plans to make it someone else's headache. But... just as I was about to throw in the towel I had a "brain wave" and threw out a hail mary on Reddit in a last ditch effort to bring them back.
As a result of that last ditch effort I found a small machine shop that just happened to have the machine we needed and was willing to work in volumes that we can (almost) afford. We made a few tweaks to the kits to make them easier to make (standard threading instead of custom threads... who uses custom threads on a pen?!) and had to fudge a few measurements since the drawings I was working from were apparently wrong... but our first 600 Liberty Click pens are at UPS and headed this way. I've got to do some thorough testing before I unleash them on you guys, but I have high hopes for them being correct. Even better, they should be the same every time going forward so we don't have to hand test each batch looking for weird changes that were made without our asking for them.
Desire is on deck... but it'll be a month or so before we can get the machine time. Eventually we'll have everything back in stock but it's going to be a process because the drawings aren't accurate, we don't have unlimited funds after being out of stock of these for over a year, etc. I am, however, FIRMLY committed to bringing back our US made kits and bringing out designs we weren't able to do before because of limitations with our machinist.
We've had 2 false starts with machine shops that either gave up or in one case just disappeared on us... LOTS of "no quotes" Quite a few "$35 per part" quotes that would put the pen kit cost north of 300 I think... etc. It was so bad I was pricing out our finishing equipment, etc with plans to make it someone else's headache. But... just as I was about to throw in the towel I had a "brain wave" and threw out a hail mary on Reddit in a last ditch effort to bring them back.
As a result of that last ditch effort I found a small machine shop that just happened to have the machine we needed and was willing to work in volumes that we can (almost) afford. We made a few tweaks to the kits to make them easier to make (standard threading instead of custom threads... who uses custom threads on a pen?!) and had to fudge a few measurements since the drawings I was working from were apparently wrong... but our first 600 Liberty Click pens are at UPS and headed this way. I've got to do some thorough testing before I unleash them on you guys, but I have high hopes for them being correct. Even better, they should be the same every time going forward so we don't have to hand test each batch looking for weird changes that were made without our asking for them.
Desire is on deck... but it'll be a month or so before we can get the machine time. Eventually we'll have everything back in stock but it's going to be a process because the drawings aren't accurate, we don't have unlimited funds after being out of stock of these for over a year, etc. I am, however, FIRMLY committed to bringing back our US made kits and bringing out designs we weren't able to do before because of limitations with our machinist.