February 8th 2024
Time for a Gamecube update. We are looking at another delay. The new date we are expecting is June 29th 2024. Not what we were hoping to share but it has been unavoidable. If you are interested in a detailed schedule and reasons for how we got here continue reading this post.
Once the mold factory team returns after Lunar New Year. mold production will start. Meaning steel will be cut and the work to have the molds come together will happen. The factory is estimating they will have the molds assembled and ready for test shots by March 25th.
Once test shots arrive we will look them over and test them to make sure no problems have occurred. I will plan to do a livestream for this step. I expect between shipping and looking them over this will be done by April 8th.
If no problems are found with the test shots then we move on to surfacing. If issues are found we will coordinate with the mold maker, but I believe all the checking and rechecking we have done on the files and 3d prints should help avoid any major problems though.
After this it should take another week to add the final surfacing to the molds. (April 15th) Then new test shots will be done and we will inspect those. Should take about a week which puts us at April 22nd.
After this we will be ready to ship the molds. I’m assuming from previous experience that packing and preparing the shipments will take about a week. Which puts us as April 29th. Shipping varies between 30 and 40 days. So we will allot 6 weeks for this which puts us at June 10th.
Production will begin after some brief checking and testing of molds (about a day). I’m guessing production will take about 2 weeks. Which puts us at June 24th.
So that is the schedule. There are a few things that could lengthen it and some things could go faster. There are also some other parts being done separately from the normal molding process which we will share more on later. Now if you want to know how we got here keep reading
End of November we were communicating back and forth with the mold company. I have an engineer at my local factory that checks things over to make sure that the molds will run smoothly. He was able to share his experience with the factory in China to have changes made.
Changes would take a day or two and they would send updated files for us to look at, my engineer would look them over and approve them. There were a few things that would just bounce back and forth though.
Two things kind of stacked up on us in December. We had some issues that we were struggling to communicate to the mold company. We had some changes that my local engineer was adamant about. He would send a message and then because of time zone differences we wouldn’t get a response till the next day.
So a problem I thought we could solve in two days ended up taking 2 weeks. We got this sorted out but then my local engineer disappeared for Christmas vacation. I wasn’t aware of when he was leaving so I had been surprised by his lack of communication.
I was pretty bummed at this point because we needed to start cutting steel to have any hope of having these done before the Lunar New Year. We had other issues as well with validating changes the mold company wanted to do to make the design easier to mold for.
Some of the changes were no brainers but keeping track of them and making sure the changes didn’t stack on top of each other was actually a difficult task.
Hopefully all these details are useful. I appreciate everyone’s patience. This has been a long painful process but we are going to get there.