Shipping progress
We've shipped all controller boards, all early backers and 156 additional Hexys so far. Huzzah!
Production Schedule
We're producing around 150 kits a week right now with our cutters going full bore. At the rate we're going, we should be finished shipping by the end of December.
Christmas Gifts
If you have an urgent need for kit (christmas gift, school project, etc), please let us know at info@arcbotics.com, and we'll see what we can do. This is especially true if you're an international order, as those can take weeks. We're sorry for not shipping on time, and the last thing we'd want to cause is an empty tree or failed project because of it.
Clarification on Distributor orders:
We're sorry to have disappointed you guys in terms of shipping a limited number of units to stores. Long story short: we're selling just enough units to pay rent and keep going, which so far has been ~2 days worth of production cutting. What we're not doing is building a business off you guys while we push you to the back of the line. We are just trying to make enough additional money to pay rent and eat while we ship robots. We've been actively turning down any new distributors and partnerships, and even to those existing ones we're only selling what is needed to keep us going. We will continue to keep any outside selling to a minimum until after the kickstarter orders are finished.
To recap on our previous post, Kickstarter backers were supposed to receive their units first. This was the plan all along, and it took extraordinary circumstances for us to deviate from that. The original plan was to have the laser cutting done in China months ago. We were lied to for months about their manufacturing capacity, and ended up having to cut it ourselves. Then our cutter caught on fire, so we leased two more. Although we have everything else needed to ship kits (servos, screws, electronics, etc), the last bottleneck is cutting enough acrylic, which is limited by our laser cutting capacity. We've overcome situations that we think would have folded people less driven to deliver on their promises, but we're determined to deliver these units.
Because of these delays, if we didn't sell units to distributors, I wouldn't have enough money to keep going, and pay for essentials like rent and part-time help salary. I could either:
1.) Ask for more money from you guys. This was just unacceptable to me.
2.) Ship only to kickstarter people first, run out of money, have to do other work to pay the bills, and delay shipping for months as we'd only be able to cut part-time.
3.) Ship just enough to distributors to pay the bills, and thus be able to continue working 100+ hours weeks getting units shipped to kickstarter people,
We made the choice that lets us get the kickstarter units out as fast as possible. We're now laser cutting non-stop, and shipping out the units to kickstarter people as fast as we can. We're sorry for the delays, and are looking forward to getting you your early backer discounted kit as soon as possible.
