Spoke To The Factory

[RotsiserMho]

Ok, Chinese new year is coming (Feb 14th), and this literally means China will be shut for 2 weeks (according to Chinese mould makers I liaise with in my work). The open Pandora team disparity need the finished mouldings shipped before the weekend.

Question: Do you have design freeze on all of the components (are you confident that the current design, if produced to drawing, will work without any further adjustments)?

if the answer is yes, then I can only suggest what I would do, given the same situation:

There is now no reason why an order for the full quantity cannot be placed on the moulders, given the right amount of quality control. The Pandora team need to make it clear to the mould makers what is acceptable, and what is not, use plenty of marked up images in a document that clearly describes the current issues.

The images I have seen show little or no finishing, the surface finish of these parts is critical as often, it covers the imperfections of the mould. Decide on a level of surface roughness, the VDI or Ra index for spark erosion is universally accepted to be the norm.

Most importantly make it clear to the moulders that if the quality of the components does not meet your requirements, then these parts will fail inspection and be rejected back to supplier, at their cost. Also make it clear that this process is not only for the initial batch, but every subsequent batch supplied indefinitely.

It is also standard practice to request a certificate of conformity for material supplied with every batch, and also an ISIR (Initial sample inspection report) for the first batch, detailing the accuracy of the critical dimensions and features to tolerances provided on the drawings (useful paperwork, if there is such a thing).

I'm not promising these actions will get you everything perfect, but it does give you a get out of jail free card, if things do go wrong again. Hopefully you will get a sizable quantity of good parts to use for production, and get the ball rolling.

I have not suggested anything here that is not industry standard, In fact any company that wants ISO9001 certification, needs procedures as described above.

Good luck.

Ps, It is now Monday, 5am in China, they will all be in work in 3-4 hours time.

Late to the party as always but yay on the green light!!

Fatih had some other good stuff to say that makes a more technically concerned person like myself happy:

"He told me that this is just a sample to see the changes. All those scratches, marks, discolored parts, rough edges and plastic overflows will not exist in final production. I asked the reason for these as well and how will they disappear during production. He told me that during production a water cooling system will be set up to avoid these problems. He told me that because the workers was in a hurry they dripped those coating and made rough edges etc. According to him there won't be any problems during production because they have a ISO standard quality control procedure."

As someone who works for a company with an "ISO standard quality control procedure" I feel I should reiterate what Madcad77 has said here. An ISO-compliant QC system means nothing without well-defined requirements. If the factory does not have EXTREMELY explicit instructions as to the required specs. of the cases (amount of roughness, etc. as Madcad77 stated) there is NO MEANS to actually measure the quality (as quality is quite subjective, as 40+ pages of discussion will attest to).

All I'm saying is please, PLEASE make sure the factory knows EXACTLY what OpenPandora expects, not in words, not in poorly translated emails, but in engineering drawings with unambiguous units and markings. That's the only way quality will be ensured when they start cranking out thousands of these.

 

[Gricey]

 

[Monk]

Where did you get a photo of my accountant from?

 

[Xenu]

 

[hobbyman II]

your accountant? he told me he was a Nigerian "prince in exile", we are planning to smuggle nine millions of gold out of Nigeria (praise god), just as soon as we have changed my bank account to a shared account :huh:

 

[borgqueenx]

yes! way to fast then expected! i got my pandoraaaaaaaaa!!!
Picture:

 

[(naw)mcx]

 

[skyeyemachine]

I must indulge in silly graphics to display my glee.

CAUTION: FLASHING IMAGES

Spoiler

Trooper: Added a spoiler tag, Because of the flashing images. Please be a little bit
more thoughtful, And consider others before posting content, Thanks.

@trooper: Sorry, trooper (and by extension everyone); should have thought of that from the first. XP

 

[Nova]

Wow dude, how short is your thumb?

 

[S-r-ex]

Must post touhou remix of AGK to celebrate these news

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWkovGpYLtc

 

[(naw)mcx]

Wow dude, how short is your thumb?

Fucked up angle.

BONUS: Fucked Up Thumb.

 

[#1 GameMaster]

We spoke to the factory over night, everything is cool. Those errors were because the machine was not warmed up/tweaked/cooled. They would never mass produce something with such errors.

They just assumed we would know that.

So, green lighted.

Thank you guys for the birthday present.

Can't wait to get mine.

 

[Gusarapo]

Congratulations Pandora Team. Hoping everything will be alright.

 

[Monk]

Wow dude, how short is your thumb?

It was full sized until he got a gaming console with nubs - now he's worn them down

 

[kingoddball]

Video Game Thumbs! It Happens!

THANK FUCK THEY'RE COMING ALONG NOW!!

I WANT MY PANDORA! andora2ut4:

 

[borgqueenx]

So.,,.everything's ready and produced now, exept the cases? If the factory ships 4000 op can build 4000?
Or is there still more work to do.

 

[Tokiopop]

So.,,.everything's ready and produced now, exept the cases? If the factory ships 4000 op can build 4000?
Or is there still more work to do.

I think there are only 1000 boards complete, although hopfully I am mistaken

 

[MrBlais]

I hope there isn't only 1000 boards done.. I won't get mine until May then if it takes that long...

 

[WizardStan]

I hope there isn't only 1000 boards done.. I won't get mine until May then if it takes that long...

Last week MWeston said "we're about to make another 1000 boards". A few days later it was basically "ok, 1000 boards just waiting for cases."
I don't think the boards are the bottleneck here yet

 

[Clean3d]

As an artist, it's tough for me to convey some thing with words.