The plastic support piece, that we changed the steel mold on, is now fitting great. PCB board assemblies are now working great. Custom A/C adapters are in full production now, should be done by the end of the month. All will be air shipped to us. We should be able to have all the pieces at the end of the month and start shipping on the 5th.

That's our custom extrusion we are machining over a mile of docks from. Its just .03" oversize the profile of the docks and this cuts machining waste by about half. The docks themselves are made with recycled aluminum.

Lasering

We are opening our lasering web app to everyone - lasering.elevationlab.com. Thanks to the folks who had beta tested it. You can enter your Kickstarter email and postal code to see your pre-order (this may take a few seconds under load), choose your docks that you want lasered and optionally get more. On the next page you can select a location for the art and upload your pictures.

Easy way: You can upload a black on white image in jpeg or png formats, no grayscale or photos, and select the location you want it lasered. We can burn at 600dpi, so your art should be at that level for best detail - please don't use a little 200x50 logo saved off of your website. Something like 1000x1000 pixels would be better.

Advanced users: Use our .ai template to place your vector art exactly how you want it and we will laser it at max resolution. Remember to outline text in case we don't have your font.

Lasering leaves a matte white mark. It is a subtle look on the bead blasted docks and very high contrast on the MatteBlack and limited edition colors. On those colored docks, I would err on the side of very minimal lasering if you choose to do it.

If you don't want to laser, worry not, the docks look gorgeous as they are.  It is $25 for setup + $10/dock for custom lasering on either the front or top of the dock. $35 + $15/dock for both positions. 

The lasering site will be up until May 25th. We will then have to lock everything down to start shipping. 

OtterBox Defender

As promised in our FAQ, the OtterBox Defender fits in the dock when you snip off the bottom flap, if you want to still use your flap (its not going to save your phone from water), send us an email and we will mill out the front for it - kickstarter@elevationlab.com.

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Again, for shipping address changes, please send to kickstarter@elevationlab.com and not through the Kickstarter messenger. Laser related can be sent to lasering@elevationlab.com

Thanks again,

Casey

We have three issues we are solving that are affecting shipping:

Plastic support - One of our molded pieces holding our connector needs to be shortened 0.2mm to make it fit better - the connector assembly cannot seat itself all the way down. The tool is in the process of being changed now.  Subtracting material from a molded part is a bit more difficult and time consuming than adding material because they must add steel to the tool by welding and then re-machining.

Circuit Board - We got our first small production run of PCBA's and they had quality issues. The main culprit was the soldering of the flexible FPC that connects our low-friction connector to the main board. We have adjusted the layout and the factory is building special fixturing and a PCBA test tool to make sure every one works before it ships to us. We err far on the side of risk mitigation and can't ship until we know the parts we send are working and durable. One luxury we don't have are a bunch of production Docks in the wild to see if and where anything fails.

USB power adapters - For the A/C power adapters for the Dock+ versions, we have been testing 4 samples each of 3 different models that we liked (as we mentioned in Update #9). After 1.5 months of real world testing, 3 different ones went bad. That makes all those a non-starter on our end. The good thing is we have kept working on our originally designed charger, intended for future use. We will now be going with it and we have a full court press on to get them made and certified asap.

In all, this is going to put us about 30 days beyond our expected date. We will be spending a small fortune to air ship pallets of parts that are delayed coming from Shenzen.

If you need to change your shipping address, no problem, just email us your info to kickstarter@elevationlab.com and we will take care of it for you.

On the very brightside

Our custom low friction connector assembly is working great. These are technical, high-precision metal and plastic parts that are flat out difficult to design and make. We are the only company to have done this. We think you will be pleased and it will be worth the wait.

Audio sounds louder when its in the dock, especially on hard surfaces like your desktop. Our through-dock acoustic holes are doing their job.

Special thanks to Dan Day, our talented and tireless electrical engineer that has seen this project through. Having worked on much more difficult projects like debugging Intel chipsets, he has been meticulous with layout and signal integrity on these docks. An audiophile, you can thank him for the Japanese made ceramic EMI filters, designed for high-end audio, that are on the Dock+ versions. Dan will be taking his skills back to Intel next month and we wish him great things. 

Thanks, 

Casey

The first 10k lbs of aluminum came in a standard size extruded rectangle, the +20k behind that is an extrusion from a custom die we had made that is .03" oversize the side profile so we cut down on machine time and waste. Did we mention the aluminum is recycled?

Schedule

Barring any fit or quality issues with the first run of parts we get, we should be able to start final assembly and shipping on April 28th.  Machining, assembly and shipping will certainly go through May. They will go out roughly in the order they were backed.

We are scheduled to shoot our first off-tool plastic parts for the connector mount structure on our three steel injection molds April 9th. The parts will be overnighted to us. If they look good, they will go into around-the-clock production, which should take only about a week to make all those parts.

We already have the silicone feet and switch pads, they look really good:

On the machining end, we have been running at a throttled down pace until we have those first internal production parts and know they fit correctly. There is no room for error when you are doing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machining and at this scale. In this run of ~500 we are doing now, we are also mitigating quality issues and optimizing the toolpaths.  When we know everything works and fits perfectly, we will crank it up to 2500-5000 docks per week - as fast the shop can go.  

I will not be machining all the docks by hand like in the video (about a hundred folks asked, I'm sure you're all disappointed). However, they are getting the same amount of love from giant state-of-the-art horizontal CNC's all connected together with a robotic cell loading system.

We have ten custom fixturing plates (called tombstones) that hold 30 docks on 4 sides. The tombstones are loaded up with aluminum billet and put in queue to automatically go into an open machine when the tombstone in front is finished. Parts run 23 hours per day. It would be tough anyone to do it better/faster than this - these are the McLaren F1's of CNC machines and I'm told Apple uses the exact same ones.

All this machining and anodizing is going down in Sherwood, Oregon, home of Hopkins Elementary - the public school my grandparents founded during the Great Depression.

Thanks again,

Casey

Heck of a run. Thank you to every backer around the world for making this happen. NPR taped the final minutes with us live on air, so you can look for that on All Things Considered this evening.

We will be sending out forms to everyone in the coming days to verify order accuracy and get other necessary info. Going forward, emailing kickstarter@elevationlab.com is a better way to communicate with us than via Kickstarter.

Looking forward to sharing with you as we gear up to put all these docks into production, it should be quite the spectacle. 

Yours,

Casey