Hey Everyone,
It's time for an update on the Voltmeter Clocks. The bare sheet metal cases were delivered last week to our powder coating house. I spoke with them on Thursday morning and they expect cases to be done early next week. From there, the cases are delivered to our assembly team and then are delivered to our logistics team for final shipment to you!
Our sheet metal house sent us the picture of the bare case below. The paint will really bring it to life!
If you're curious what the powder coat process looks like, we have some great pictures from our last production batch.
Quality Improvements and Other Stuff We Learned
Lot's of thanks to everybody for your patience! One of the unseen benefits of having to wait for batch #3 is that we are now better at making Clocks.
A small percentage of people had trouble with our directions. The trick is to set Calibration first, then to change back to TIME mode. You will likely need to turn the Adjust knob several times; the minutes hand is connected to the hours hand so it will need to "loop around the dial" until the hours hand is set. Here's a link to some video directions we put together when we were shipping our very first batch to Kickstarter backers.
For those who are process control nerds, here's a fun story about quality improvements to the Clock. The first batch, shipped to Kickstarter backers, had a field failure rate of about 5%. (don't worry, we repaired or replaced Clocks free of charge for anyone who had an issue, we want to stand by our work! ) The field failures were due to some debris which stuck in the meter needle mechanism, which in turn was traced back to a wire brush used to clean some parts at the meter factory. We had a screening procedure in place at final assembly, but it was too simple to catch the problem. We revised the screening test and the field failure rate on batch #2 dropped to 0.2%
If you have any questions or issues, the best way to reach us is to email questions@awkwardengineer.com and we're pretty good about responding within 24 hours. We're here to take care of you.
What Else?
That's about it for now! If your address has changed, let us know! The clocks will ship very soon and we'll be back to working on cool stuff for Awkward Engineer.
Best regards!
Sam
aka THE Awkward Engineer