I've been out of town much of this last month and I apologize for my lack of regular updates over the past months on the K3 Options. The buck stops here - I apologize and take full responsibility for the slow updates and delays in getting these completed and shipped.
The bottom line: We and our vendors were overloaded and had way over estimated our ability to build and get the options and our regular core products products out the door at the same time. We've been 'heads down' focusing on adding capacity to correct this situation. In my last update I was way over optimistic about our in-house production ramp up rate and the capacity of our Caif. based PCB assembly houses and their ability to ramp up production of all of our main products and the very large number of individual K3 option boards at the same time. The ongoing semiconductor shortages, while improving, have also continued to put sand in the gears of production as we took time to hunt down numerous hard to get parts. We -have- been successful at getting the very large number of KIO3B and KSYN3A options built and shipped, along with the K144XV and K144RFLK orders. But that, combined with our post-COVID ramping up of our K4, Amplifier and Autotuner product lines, severely taxed both our inside final assembly and our outside PCB assembly sub-contractor's abilities to handle everything at once. We had to pull back and reset to add production capacity and first focus on our core Radio, Amp and Auto-Tuner products, with the K3 last time buy options following that. We have now qualified and added several additional CA based PCB assembly houses to work with our parts ordering group, which greatly increases our production capacity. We are already using them for a wide range of boards with good results and faster delivery. This increased capacity has allowed us to catch up with our K4, Amplifier and KAT500 Autotuner backlogs and these products now typically ship from stock. (or occasionally 5-10 working days after order, depending on short term order surges etc.) **Catching up on these products has opened up additional capacity for our K3 Options production, where we are now heavily focused.** We're currently working with our PCB assembly vendors to solve any remaining parts problems and to firm up the delivery dates for the remaining K3 options. Fortunately we have sufficient raw unstuffed PC boards in house for a number of the K3 options, which will speed the production process. I will report back here in about 2 weeks, during the week of 8/21, with updated status for each product, showing production status, open issues etc. (I may also report earlier on a subset of the K3 Options if we receive any of the information we've asked for early (next week or the following week.) One item that may start shipping soon is the KPA3A 100W option. We're currently confirming if we have all the sheet metal and other parts in house that go with the built and tested KPA3A RF assemblies.) One additional note: We've also been successful ramping the KX2 production rate enough to exceed the order rate and reduce the backlog. We are working hard to push that higher so KX2s are shipping from stock soon. We are also shipping against our KX3 backlog and are working hard to get that production rate up so we can get it back into a stocking situation. 73, Eric WA6HHQ *elecraft.com <http://elecraft.com>* ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com