I am sorry about the long time between updates.  Most of the day to day discussions lately have been happening over at my buildlog.net forum.

I am about 80% done with the rewards.  I still have quite a few international ones to finish.  They take a long time because each country has different restrictions on length and that often requires tweaking of the cut lists.  That and the time delays make each one take a few days to work out.  I ran short on some materials and packing materials for about a week, so that slowed me down, but now I have a ton (literally) of stock and can fill all the orders for a long time now.  Many of the lowest level rewards are in process too.  Hang in there I am on the home stretch.

I have been working on the store and it is about ready to go.  It required some custom programming of the Zen Cart software to allow me to create custom cut lists and calculate the weights, etc.  I think it is good to go, but I will wait to turn it on until the rewards are out.  I will post and update when it is ready to go live.

There are a lot of exciting projects starting to use Makerslide.  I created a partial list of the ones people would let me share on a web page here.

Here are a few images.  Go to this page for a few more details.

The 2.x open source laser now uses MakerSlide

ShapeOko

MendelMax 3D Printer now using MakerSlide

Simple $100 Motorized Camera Slider

I finally got the last items, the carriage plates.  I have started shipping rewards.  I shipped a few today to get the feel for shipping the large boxes.  I have a bunch more to ship tomorrow.  I should get into full production soon.  

I have realized that there might be a large amount of scrap if I don't coordinate the cutting with all orders.  I am testing some cut optimization software.  This lets you plugin all the cuts and tells you how to best to arrange the cuts on each piece.  If anyone can recommend good free or cheap optimization software, please post a message here.

I made a quick cutting setup out of MakerSlide and a standard carriage.  Here is a video of the cutting area.

People were asking for photos of the extrusion fabricator.  Unfortunately I did not take any photos, but here is a quick video of my simple work area (garage) for the MakerSlide material.

I wanted a little more control over the first delivery so I went to pick it up myself.  I don't have a fork lift or raised dock, so I knew the unload would be slow and manual.  My friend Edward Ford (of ShapeOko fame) went with me.  I rented a really big 22 foot moving truck and drove to the extruder.  

We got an amazing tour of the facility.  It was huge, loud and quite industrial looking.  The extruders are the size of small locomotives.  

The aluminum starts as billets about 8 inch in diameter and about 3 feet long.  They are preheated in an oven to close to 1000 degrees.  They are loaded into the extrusion press and pushed through the dies.  The business end of a die like mine consists of two parts.  The aluminum first flows over the mandril.  This has some flow forming channels and then a protruding portion that sticks into the other part of the die.  This protruding portion forms the voids in the extrusion.  My part has a several voids.  The second part of the die forms the exterior shape of the extrusion.

The extrusion comes out of the die onto a long cooling rack.  Much of the cooling rack is made of graphite to deal with the heat.  The graphite rubs off and gets everywhere so the place is quite dirty with this dust. The parts flow out about 130 feet and are cut off.  There is a complicated set of cams that "walk" the long extrusion to another table to make room for the next piece.  There is a lot of loss involved in the process so they need to estimate how much to run to get the finished amount.  They try to hit the goal +/-10%.  In my case they were on the low end which puts me short 195 feet.  I hope that does not affect the rewards.

The extrusions are cut down to a working length then heat treated in an oven.  They are then cut to the finished length and sent to the anodizer.  The anodizer attaches electrodes to the ends of each piece and dips them in a tank with a voltage applied to the parts.  There is usually a "rack mark" towards the ends of the pieces that causes a small blemish in the finish.  It does not affect the performance of the part. There are also a bunch of parts that were precut to 200mm and anodized black for the laser engraving.

Went we got home Edward and I hand stacked them onto some industrial racking I had installed in the garage.  It took well over an hour.

Sorry if I did not respond to any email yesterday, but the whole odyssey took about 14 hours. 

$128 people get 12 feet of material.  If there are any other typos, let me know.  If this affected your survey response, send me a private message.