Since our last update in March we have had a busy time in the factory.
To be honest through, with a small team of just 5 of us, it is almost always busy :-)
To give you a flavour of what we have been up to:
- Production of the Series 1 car is pretty much done - we are finalising some remaining details (like the cloth soft top) and waiting for the rubber tyres to be delivered. The design for the remote control components (drive, steering, sound and lights) is finalised and tested, so we now need to order the gears in and manufacture the gearbox, brackets and a few other parts.
- Preparing for our next two kits has required a bit of work - especially as the next kit is already in full production mode with lots of changes having been put through ... and the kit after that is a stunner! More on that later ...
- We have created a new design for machine gun smoke - the intention being that when the machine gun fires, smoke pulses out of the machine gun barrel. The prototype electronics board are in production and we will make the mechanical part in the next few weeks. With considerable good fortune we should be able to have a prototype in time for Militracks towards the end of May. The good thing here is that if this works out as planned then we should be able to reuse many parts for barrel smoke so that when the tank fires, smoke comes out of the barrel with realistic force and quantity.
- We have also got a new design for our recoil module and a whole new mechanical design. The intention is to have a much faster recoil with a slow recovery - without needing to use the cam setup. There is still a lot of work to be done on this one and we hope to launch it along with our next kit ... so probably not until late this summer.
- And finally, we have a new super secret project brewing .. it is not a kit and it does involve electronics .... but that is all that we can say for now. If it works out, it may make an appearance at TankFest at the end of June, but time is very tight for that.
So, Spring has Sprung .... the cold weather has been banished, days are longer, the Sun is out and we have a lot to be excited about for the coming few months ..... although if we get all the above done in the timeline listed then we should have also played the lottery :-)
On a final note, we would like to recognise a couple of builders that are documenting their builds on YouTube - Tony's Workshop and Brian Ostlind. We know many of you have already watched the videos because we have received many positive comments from you, but for those who have not followed along, we highly recommend watching the channels and subscribing. The links are below.
- Monique and Kian |