Another Shepherd Tool Sale? Didn't they just...

Re: Juggling...

Doug Evans

>Hi Louis:

Ben kinda took me by surprise with that one but, in general a good part of the CNC is behind us.

The gamble a few weeks back was to force ourselves to run our own parts to the existing orders. We set a fairly high initial objective in that we had to pre-determine a number of hold-down methodologies and fixturing pockets for the larger bench planes. So far, we have made four of our existing parts and by Friday last week, we had basically broken the back with the technology.

Today, we will start in on brass.

We have prototyped one new non-tool-related part of a fiar degree of complexity, as well. It will be at least a month before we can get into serious prototyping again. We had steel cut a year ago to prototype an indexable mouth smoother over a year ago, similar in concept to the one in the thread below - hopefully we can get back to it soon.

In our scramble to get the machine up and running and parts flowing, it has been quite a madhouse. I have wiring and conduit jury-rigged (read strung between the roof stringers). We have a hobbled vacuum system set-up. I start my day filing and hammering finished planes for orders before Ben arrives. At night, if I am not at a baseball game or too tired, I paint the Retail front end. As many can tell, Ben has been doing a lot of work on the website. He does most of this work at night because his back is giving him so much pain that he isnt sleeping. I have a number of clips from the California build sessions which he will be adding to the site tonight and tomorrow. Soon , we will attempt our first video newsletter.

All said and done though... things are as we expected them to be - the plan is unfolding well.

By the end of this week, we should be well in control.

Cheers,

Doug