Daily little challenges
Every week seems to bring one or two “stop the factory” moments.
Two weeks ago, there were four of them in one day. I had a stiff cocktail that night. Two of those were resolved that week, one today, and I hope to have the last one solved next week.
Some of these issues are caused by COVID, but mostly it's simply the difficulty of the task we're trying to accomplish: small production of a high quality, high tech, hand-made device.
I'd like to share one such with you.
We use a thin piece of fiberglass to thermally isolate the hot group head parts from the cool group head parts (arrow pointing to it on top left photo).
Dividing the group head into two thermal zones is one of our “secrets” (whoops!) for how we're able to go from “cold” to “perfect temperature” in 4.5 minutes.
This thin piece of fiberglass also serves to define the point at which a portafilter stops and feels locked, when you put it into the group head. Small thickness changes have a big effect.
Ten days ago, we received 1000 pieces of this fiberglass spacer, and they were all about 0.2mm too thick. The result: the portafilters lock too far in (bottom left photo).
The portafilter is supposed to lock at a point that is symmetric to the group head handle opposite it (bottom right photo). I won't ship a machine out unless those two handles are symmetric.
Our PCB manufacturer visited us the next day, but they couldn't fix this super fast, as it's a problem with their raw PCB stock.
So, we ordered URGENT 24 hour delivery from PCBWay, at about $1.50 each, 50 pieces, for that weeks' run of machines. They were perfect (within 0.02mm), and so we ordered “less urgent” (7 days) replacements.
On Friday, I told my staff that they could have Saturday off, because we couldn't build any more machines. We didn't have the spacers yet, and we'd built as far as we could without putting the group head in.
Saturday morning, Bugs and I are working in the empty factory. Delivery: 1000 (hopefully perfect) spacers.
Thanks to this delivery, on monday, we're can finish the 50 espresso machines that are now 60% completed.
And we're unblocked until the next emergency.
Which (foreshadowing a bit) is that our stock is down to seven Android tablets, due to LCD screen shortages causing our Android tablet manufacturer to delay by 120 days. All this week we've been evaluating off-the-shelf Android tablets that can hold us through this shortage. These are way more expensive for us, but they're nicer tablets for customers IPS screens, instead of LCD, for instance) but we have no choice. I'll be hopefully making a social media post about that change in a few days.
-john
#factory #challenges #DE1history
Updated 2020/09/26