K3 Status Update - Oct 31, 2007
K3s are going out the door on a regular basis, but we're still shipping
at a rate slower than I would like to see. My gut feeling is that we are
off of our last plan by 1-2 of weeks. Last week we resolved most of our
remaining major supplier problems (after hand winding a number of
additional toroids) and we have been getting a steadily increasing
stream of boards from our PCB assembly house. We still chase minor
production and supplier issues each day, but so far none of them are
show stoppers. We had a couple of fire drills (wrong caps mounted on
boards at the assembly house, a few phantom problems that turned out
-not- to be real problems, etc.) All of these have been resolved in
house (before shipping) fairly quickly, but each time a problem pops up,
we end up delaying shipments while we make sure it is corrected
properly. Our top priority is to ship a quality product, not to push out
high volume before it is ready.
We're working overtime in Aptos to ramp up K3 production. Board test,
final assembly and alignment is now our main bottleneck. We have hired
extra production and test tech. staff to increase our daily K3
production rate - Another test tech. starts with us tomorrow. :-) We've
even put out the word to local ham clubs looking for test technicians
for our production test group, and assemblers too. (Contact
[EMAIL PROTECTED] if you are local and might be interested.) We're also
putting in place more automated testing each day to speed things through
the line.
The good news is that we are not seeing any major problems in the field.
We've been keeping in contact with our early customers as they bring up
their K3s, and so far we have been getting great reports. (S/Ns are
definitely past the 20's..)
I'll update the shipping status page to reflect our current projections.
One note - We received such a large surge of orders the first 1-5 days
after we announced the K3 that we are still working on building and
shipping that group and will be for at least another week or more. When
I catch my breath some time next week, I'll try to start posting what
approximate order dates we are shipping each week on the status page.
Unfortunately I can't answer every list email. To stay focused on
production issues I read the list just once a day on average. (It makes
great late night reading..)
Lisa and our front office crew have been doing a herculean job of both
handling our regular orders and calls along with 30-50 additional emails
a day (plus phone calls) asking for order status, making order changes
etc. If you have not ordered before April 10th, we would appreciate your
holding off emailing us for status as much as possible. We understand if
you really need to contact us, but the less time we're on the phone or
on email, the more time we can focus on producing K3s. :-)
Wayne, myself and the rest of our crew take your concerns and
frustrations with any delays -very- personally. We are 100% focused on
getting K3s rolling out to everyone on a steadily increasing basis and
will not rest until everyone is on the air with their K3.
73, Eric WA6HHQ
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