Hi newguy, it was me that you refer to regarding the conical fabrication.
It is still going ahead but it is painfully slow. Unfortunately I've discovered that my mate (who is doing the welding) has the best of intentions but doesn't really come through on the goods. A while ago we had a deep conversation about how he was really keen to do his own work outside of his employer, he had finally bought some decent tig gear and he wanted to spend every Friday night and Saturday morning working on these things. That was when I posted the last update saying that finally, things are moving on.
As it turns out, we did 2 Saturday mornings, which were actually only 3 hours at a time, and he brought other little jobs with him - so we didn't really get an awful lot done on the conicals. Then he called me to say that his employer is flat out and is offering double time for overtime until the end of January, and that he probably wouldn't be able to put in any hours until after then.
I was counting on him to help me iron out parts of the process, but it looks like I will need to sort everything out myself and just hand him the piece-work (which he is still keen to do). Unfortunately I'm flat out with my own business just at the moment so I haven't been able to dedicate much time to the project.
The situation is that we have the design and the suppliers just about all sorted out. We have built 3 or 4 prototypes to check things like lid fitment etc, and I'm really happy with the way they are going to look and the options that we'll be able to make available. The thing that's holding us up really is the fabrication jig, to bring down the labour costs of stitching everything together. Both of us are confident it can be done efficiently without too much trouble, but I think Glyn is used to somebody else solving all the problems and just saying 'here, weld this'. As I said, I was really counting on getting a bit of input from the guy with the welding experience but this isn't really happening just at the moment, so that's thrown a spanner in the works.
I posted some pics ages ago in
this thread, I'll try and dig out what I've got built so far (eg, the lid assembly) and maybe post some more pics just to prove I'm not lying...
It's really frustrating as the whole project is making me look like I'm full of sh1t, both to the suppliers and on this board, but I've invested a lot of hours and cash into this and I reckon we've got a better design and a lower cost than any I've seen, so I'm certainly not going to let it go.
I really can't give any dates though unfortunately, I was so keen to get them happening last year and I just got let down time and again, and progress this year has been sloppy so I feel a bit stupid even mentioning it any more. I'm now taking a softly softly approach, we'll chip away at it here and there and hopefully we'll start producing them 'eventually'. I'd like it to be next year of course.
