Well it has been a crazy two weeks. We got slammed with inquiries about our track system. It seems that the FIRST robotics competition announced the contest goals early January. Which lead to a lot of teams contacting us about our track system. Within 2 days we had sold our entire stock of parts, and everything we had raw material to make as well.

While being awesome that we sold everything we had, it also meant that we needed to get more parts ASAP. The custom pins are the big kicker. All the other raw materials are at least somewhat stock items. But the pins are completely custom and take some time to make and ship to us. So we ordered 10,000 pins! This is 10 times what my original order was when I started this project. The are supposed to ship Jan 25, so we should have them a few days later.

The key aspect of this rush of orders is that teams are competing in this FIRST competition and they only have 6 weeks to build their robots. So they need parts fast. We have scaled up our in house production over the past few months to deal with the small number of orders in a timely manner. We now have 3 molds running parts and can make about 15 parts per hour. This is not terribly fast, but when I first started I was making 2 parts every 4 hours.

So it was time to scale up production again and move to a getting parts injection molded. Back in February I had talked to several injection molding companies to get budgetary quotes. I wanted to know if this idea was even practical from a cost point of view. I knew that I could make parts in small volume and that the product worked. But could this idea be scaled up and could we sell the track for a reasonable price. I also wanted to test the market at that reasonable price. So I did the research, talked with companies, and got quotes.

It is lucky for me that I had all this work done already. It would not have been possible to get a run of injection molded parts done as fast as I am, without already having a lot of these questions answered. So last week I called up my supplier and pulled the trigger. As we speak a production injection mold is being machined and the goal is to shoot the mold Feb 1st. We are getting 5000 parts made ASAP, and hope to increase that order.

It is a wild ride, that is for sure.