Turing Tumble Progress Update #17: Turing Tumble is Kickstarted
over 5 years ago – Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 11:22:44 PM

Friends,

I thought I'd write one last Kickstarter update for you all. From here on, we'll keep updates going through email, but only if you sign up. You can sign up at the very bottom of the main turingtumble.com page. We can't express how much we've enjoyed communicating with you through these updates and we'd love to continue.

It's been just over a year since this Kickstarter project began and I think we can safely say that Turing Tumble is officially kickstarted. It WORKED! Thank you all SO much for your support this last year. There's no way it would have happened without your faith in us, your generosity, and your kind words of support. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

Educator Guide

I'm happy to report that the Educator Guide is complete! We created the Educator Guide to help teachers get the most out of Turing Tumble in classrooms. It contains:

• A series of ten computer logic lessons that explain how Turing Tumble relates to regular, electronic computers we use every day.  
• Puzzle-specific help that explains what each puzzle teaches and gives help for common hang-ups we've seen players have with each puzzle. 

The Educator Guide is a free download available at edu.turingtumble.com.

Here's an example of a computer logic lesson from the Educator Guide that answers the question: How is Turing Tumble a computer? 

This summer, as Alyssa and I were writing the Educator Guide, we ran classes at three local libraries where we taught the basics of how computers work using Turing Tumble. It was a chance to test out Turing Tumble in a classroom setting and see what sort of lesson material worked with kids. The classes went incredibly well! Granted, we lost a few balls, but the students understood it and they were super engaged! They learned how to build logic gates, how to read truth tables, how to read binary, and if you asked any of them why computers use binary, they could answer you in their own words.

It was surreal to see rooms full of kids playing Turing Tumble and learning.

New Turing Tumble Simulator

When one of our Kickstarter backers, Lode Vandevenne, made a Turing Tumble simulator called JSTumble, we were excited about it. We've been using it frequently on the Turing Tumble community forum to share puzzle ideas and alternative solutions. But I didn't realize how useful a Turing Tumble simulator would be in a classroom setting. It turns out that it's extremely useful for demonstrating in front of a classroom. You can project it on a screen, build machines on it quickly, and run it right there on screen for your class to watch and follow along.

Recently, Jesse Crossen created a beautiful new Turing Tumble simulator.

Try it out if you have a moment. It's super cool. The parts look just like the real ones, so it's easy for kids to follow along, and you can even make the board bigger if you like. It animates balls falling through it with realistic physics, too.

Turing Tumble VR

You might remember an update a while back where Tom Verdier showed an early iteration of a virtual reality Turing Tumble that he made. Well he finished it and it's now available on Steam.

I've learned that Tom is an amazing VR programmer. It was not easy to get the physics right. The way I understand it, Tom actually had to rewrite parts of a physics engine to get it working properly. And figuring out how to make the sound realistic was no small feat, either. It's a pretty fun experience solving puzzles on a 40-foot tall Turing Tumble board in space!

TTVR has the ability to save and load board setups, and it has the smarts built in to test whether your solution solves a puzzle or not. Turing Tumble VR currently runs on the HTC Vive.

ASTRA Best Toys for Kids Award

This June, Turing Tumble got another big award. There's an association here in the US called the American Specialty Toy Retailer Association (ASTRA). Every year, at the ASTRA show (it's the 2nd biggest toy conference in the US), toy store owners from around the country vote on toys they think should win the award. We didn't think we stood a chance, being so new to the industry, and at the time, not being in very many retail stores. But we won the award in the "Logic" toys category! And now we can put this cool award logo on things. :)

Just a couple weeks ago, I submitted Turing Tumble for one of the Toy Association's famous "Toy of the Year" awards. Fingers crossed!

Retail Stores

More and more toy stores are beginning to carry Turing Tumble. In fact, a couple local toy stores I visited frequently as a kid called "Air Traffic" and "Games by James" are going to carry Turing Tumble soon. I think it's going to be a little emotional for me to walk in and see Turing Tumble on display there.

If you're ever walking through a toy or game store and you have a moment, it would mean a lot to us if you could ask them if they carry Turing Tumble. We haven't yet figured out how to reach all the little toy stores around the country, but toy stores pay attention when customers specifically ask for a product. And Turing Tumble has done well in toy stores so far - especially when there's a demo on display.

Shipping

There were a few countries where shipping took WAY longer than we expected (sorry Switzerland!), and there were some countries we couldn't ship to at all, but at this point, shipping is more or less complete. If you still haven't received your game or you have other issues, please email [email protected] and we'll sort it out - er, Corinne will. (See below.)

Corinne

A few weeks ago, we added a fourth person to our team: Corinne.

Corinne is super organized and an administrative powerhouse, among other things. She has already learned to navigate the settings in Shopify down to changing the html, and she isn't even a programmer! But you know, she's played Turing Tumble with her three boys, so she's pretty much there. :) She has been handling the bulk of our customer service lately and is doing a great job working out the toy store orders, education orders, and shipping glitches. Her biggest obstacle so far has been communicating her email address: [email protected]. She has to explain the pronunciation and spelling of both "corinne" AND "turing". She has a lot of patience.

What's next for Turing Tumble?

I suppose someday, when they make a blockbuster movie series about Turing Tumble, this will be our origin story. And this final Kickstarter update will be the end of the first movie - the part where we say goodbye to our friends for a little while and the credits roll. We'll keep up over email, but it just won't be the same. We'll really miss you all.

So what's next? We're focused on five different things now:

1. Education. We're working to find ways to spread the word about Turing Tumble to more educators. Now that there's a tool to do it, Alyssa and I would like to see it become standard to teach kids how computers work at a basic level starting in elementary school. We're offering discounts to educators (email [email protected] for details) to make cost less of an obstacle.

2. The next thing! I can't tell you how good it feels to have fulfillment complete and the Educator Guide done. It's time to get back to that new invention I almost told you about.

3. Retail stores. The two toy shows we've been to, the ASTRA award, and being in the The Good Toy Group holiday catalog have all been great for getting the word out to toy stores in the US. But we've only reached a tiny, minuscule fraction so far. How can we spread the word to more toy/game stores?

4. Marketing. Through a lot of experimentation, we've figured out some things that work to get the word out about Turing Tumble and some things that don't. We've learned an awful lot. We're going to keep experimenting and find more things that work.

5. International markets. The Kickstarter gave us a bit of a head start in countries other than the US. Now we plan to build those out more. We've got a lot to figure out...

I guess that's it. Wow. This Kickstarter has been quite an adventure. There were many, many times over the last year when difficult problems arose and we wondered if things would work at all. We had plenty of sleepless nights and Alyssa and I have quite a bit more gray hair than we had last year. But it was totally worth it. We couldn't be happier with how things turned out and we're so grateful that you gave us this opportunity.

Thank you so much,

Paul and Alyssa

Turing Tumble Progress Update #16: Fulfillment is in Full Swing
almost 6 years ago – Fri, Jun 22, 2018 at 12:34:28 AM

Hello friends!

I'm happy to report that we did NOT have any catastrophic maritime tragedies. The shipping boats did what they were supposed to do and 45 metric tons of Turing Tumble were carried to five fulfillment centers around the world.

There were some delays. The ship to the UK, for instance, was much slower than expected. Alyssa bit her nails to stubs while she watched its slow, torturous voyage. It seemed like that ship had to stop at every possible port along the way. Kind of like when we try to drive somewhere with our kids. The US shipment was also slowed by a rail line switch in Chicago. The shipping containers sat for several days waiting to be put on a train bound for Louisville.

But they all made it! Now they're all in fulfillment centers (or already in some of your hands). So here's the fulfillment update:

Fulfillment Update

Canada:

Board Game Bliss did a remarkably good job of shipping everything out quickly and accurately. Almost everyone in Canada has their game.

Australia:

Let's Play Games also did a wonderful job shipping out games. They've started arriving a peoples' houses now. :)

US: 

EasyPost is in the process of shipping out orders as I write. At their current pace, they should have them all shipped within a week or so. Some people even messaged me to say that they already got their game!

One little kink, here, is that I didn't realize our US fulfillment center doesn't send out emails with tracking numbers as they ship. Instead, they use webhooks that let you integrate with other systems that send out those emails. So I'm trying to set up something quickly that will email your tracking information, but just to warn you, I might not get it done before you get your package.

EU:

You probably already got an email from Spiral Galaxy Games verifying your mailing address one final time before they ship. They give a week for responses and then they'll begin the shipping process early next week.

Everywhere Else:

VFI has done an excellent job shipping out of China. They have a complicated system set up there. They bundle orders and sometimes ship to other fulfillment centers. Some of you have already gotten your order and some are still waiting. Rest assured, your package is on its way!

Some (thankfully small) issues

After putting together and testing about 40 games ourselves, and after feedback from backers that already received the game, we discovered a couple small flaws:

1. The back, bottom-left corner of the puzzle book might be bent.

We didn't see this problem in any of the production samples, probably because air shipping is gentler, but it appears to be fairly common in the main shipments. The bag that holds the gears and gear bits sits under the book. It turns out that the bag is a little too small, so it doesn't allow the parts to spread out flat in the tray. Instead, they push up on the book, making the book stick up out of its slot. Then, during shipping, the book slips out of its slot, bending the corner of the book in the process.

Most books that are bent are only slightly bent, but once in a while, the corner is bent more than that. If yours is one of those, send us an email at [email protected] and we'll send you a new one.

2. One of the levers doesn't push down all the way when a ball lands on it.

This is a rare problem, but I ran across a couple games where the lever wouldn't push down all the way on its own. If you have this problem, take the long connector off the back and look in the holes on each end. My bet is that you'll find a little extra plastic in one of the holes.

Fortunately, this problem is easy to fix. You can either clear it out with a knife or shove a ball point pen in there and push the extra plastic aside.

The Business

I thought you might be interested in where things are now that orders are finally being fulfilled. We've learned an awful lot over the last year. I can't fit it all in here, but I thought I'd give you some highlights.

First off, besides being a shipping wizard, I discovered that Alyssa is shockingly good at business. She's sort of taken on the role of CEO. She's great at foreseeing how various choices will play out, she's strategic, and she's great at building relationships. She's done a wonderful job building the business in preparation for when we actually have the product in hand.

We've learned that there are many, many different ways you can try to sell toys/games. You can sell directly to customers, like we do on our website, but it's hard to drive traffic there. Instead, most companies try to take advantage of a range of sales channels where there are already customers. But which ones do you pursue? There are sales reps, distributors, Amazon, specialty toy stores, mass market stores, online re-sellers, snail mail catalogs, and a million other options. Each one has trade-offs to consider, and bad choices early on can have severe consequences. Other manufacturers have been generous to share their business advice with us, helping us steer clear of bad decisions.

Small companies often have limited options for sales channels, but we were lucky enough to have a successful Kickstarter behind us and the product turned out great. We were also fortunate enough to get a Parents' Choice Gold Award and more recently, a Dice Tower Seal of Excellence. Those opened some doors for us. At Toy Fair, Turing Tumble was also accepted into the The Good Toy Group's holiday catalog, which is a pretty big deal. We're also about to ship to Fat Brain Toys and the Museum of Modern Art, both of which will carry Turing Tumble. And a couple weeks ago, we attended the American Specialty Toy Retailer Association meeting in New Orleans where many brave toy store owners were the first to buy Turing Tumble to stock in their stores.

We've been thrilled to see schools getting Turing Tumble, too. And libraries! Several months ago, we started working with The Library Corporation as our distributor to libraries in the US. They've been everything you'd hope for in a distributor.

We're still putting together the puzzle of how to sell internationally. Let's Play Games, the folks who fulfilled our Kickstarter orders in Australia, have also become our distributor there. In Canada, Board Game Bliss will continue to sell Turing Tumble as well. The EU is still a bit of a question mark, though.

Anyway, things are going well. We can't wait for the rest of you to get your copy and to read what you think of it! If you have a moment, we'd LOVE it if you'd take a picture of you using it and email us or post it on social media.

Thanks again!

Paul and Alyssa

Turing Tumble Progress Update #15: Fulfillment has begun!
almost 6 years ago – Wed, Jun 06, 2018 at 12:48:59 AM

Breaking news today from Canada: the first to peanut butter, snowblowers, canola oil, the telephone, and now, the first to receive Turing Tumble.  

We are really excited to hear that our backers to the north are starting to get their games and that they are arriving in good condition! We are grateful to Bosco and the team at Board Game Bliss in Scarborough, Ontario for allowing us to fill their store with our inventory and for all the extra hours they worked to get our project fulfilled. If you live in Canada and haven’t received your game yet, rest assured it is on its way. 

This is Alyssa writing the update this time since shipping is one of my main responsibilities. I’ve learned a ton in the last year from blogs, shipping companies, and one awesome backer who just happens to be our neighbor and a freight forwarder (Thank you, Dave!). It has been stressful to experience all the steps of this first shipment. One tough day was when our freight was stuck in a rail yard in Canada racking up big bills because I hadn't filled out one of the forms needed for customs. Once I had it filled out, we couldn't move it because it was a holiday here. The following day we still couldn't move it because we hadn't made an appointment with the rail yard. 

Through all I’ve learned, I’ve adopted a shipping theme song that I'd like to share with you. Just replace “love” with “shipping”. 

With that tune stuck in your head, here is an update on the rest of the world:  

US:  

Three of the four shipping containers traveled by rail from Chicago to Louisville today. The fourth is scheduled to interchange tonight and continue on to Louisville. Tomorrow sometime the trucks will bring the containers to our warehouse where they will get unloaded and checked in. That process will take five or six days, and then they will start preparing the individual orders and sending them out as they complete them.  

EU countries:  

The Hundai Unity is rounding Gibraltar as I write this. It is scheduled to arrive at the Southampton port on June 12. You can follow its progress here.

I’ve learned that the shipping lane to the north of Africa through the Red Sea is very slow. I’ve been watching marine traffic daily and this ship looks like it is always in rush hour traffic. There are a ton of other ships trying to get through the small seas and many ports along the way where it has to stop.  

Once it gets to Southampton it will be delivered inland by a truck to Spiral Galaxy Games in Telford, UK. If you are from the EU, expect to get an email from Spiral Galaxy confirming your shipping details.

Australia and New Zealand:  

Your games will be coming soon as well! David and the Let's Play Games team started fulfillment and are expecting to have them all sent out by the end of the week. If you are on Facebook, Let’s Play Games has been regularly posting about the process here. 

Here is a great video of it arriving:

Everywhere else:  

The parcels are ready! Jeremy and the VFI team worked quickly to fulfill all of the orders, and they will get sent out tonight/morning in China). 

Helpful Hints:

When your game arrives, there are some things to assemble. Directions can be found on page iv, but there are two things that will make it easier:

1. Put the board supports together and set the board on the supports before putting the levers and ball releases in their places. This is a little easier than the directions in the front of the book. 

2. You will need to snap the small metal balls into the 30 green ramps. You can use your thumbs, but they will likely get sore! Instead, use a table or hard surface to snap them in as the video shows below.

Other News

A few weeks ago we added a third member to our Turing Tumble team: Linda. 

She is a powerhouse marketer and networker and we are incredibly grateful for the skills and energy she brings. Among other things, she has been working hard to generate great content to our Instagram page, and will be running a giveaway this week. If you are on Instagram, follow turingtumble with a chance to win another copy of the game for yourself, a friend, or teacher in your life.

Last week we found out that Turing Tumble has been selected as a 2018 Parents' Choice Award winner: GOLD. We are so honored to receive this award and were humbled to read their review. 

We also have been STEM approved by STEM.org and look forward to working with them to get Turing Tumble into the hands of educators. 

Thank you

We can't say this enough: Thank you for believing in the game from the beginning! We are so grateful for all of your support and patience as we worked through the manufacturing and shipping process. We love hearing from all of you, so please leave comments or send us messages/emails when you have tried it out!

Oh, and one more thing...

It's bittersweet, but this is probably one of our last Kickstarter updates. We are really going to miss communicating with all of you! However, if you're interested, we plan to keep writing updates about this new business you all helped start. We've got ideas for new products and we even got started on one of them. In fact, Paul recorded a video last night of a new invention he got working last week and is dying to show it to you, but we thought it might be a little too early, yet. 

If you'd like to continue getting updates from us once in a while, enter your name and email address here and we'll keep you in the loop! (Of course, we'll take good care of your information. We don't like junk mail, either.)

Your friends,

Alyssa and Paul

Turing Tumble Progress Update #14: Production is Complete!
almost 6 years ago – Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 02:00:22 AM

Friends,

Before I get into the update, let me first tell you all to double check your shipping address and update it if necessary. 

If you ordered from Kickstarter or pre-ordered from BackerKit, you can check and modify your address here: https://turingtumble.backerkit.com/ 

1. Enter your email address in the "Lost your Survey?" box. 

2. You will get an email - click the link in the email and then click the "View Confirmation" button on the top right of the page.

3. Finally, click "Edit Shipping Info" and update your address.

If you pre-ordered Turing Tumble from our website and need to change your shipping address, send me an email at [email protected] and I'll change it myself.

On to the update...

On Sunday evening I got this video from LongPack:

Production is complete! ...and the assembly factory is full of Turing Tumbles. Literally full. LongPack waited until the last minute to produce the boxes because they take up so much space. 

There are a lot of games in that video! Each pallet contains 100 games. When I count the pallets in the video (the ones you can see and the ones I assume are stacked behind them), they only account for one third of the total number of games they made. It was amazing to see this, and it was yet another one of those, "What have we gotten ourselves into?" moments that was beyond exciting and at the same time made me want to throw up. I never dreamed we'd be making so many games - I hoped we might fill part of our garage.

If you've never seen the show How It's Made, I highly recommend it. It shows how everyday items we buy are mass produced. I'm always surprised at how much of mass production is done by manual labor. It makes me appreciate the items far more when I see just how many skilled hands proudly work to form, assemble, and transport products before I take them home.

Production of Turing Tumble was no different. In the last update, I showed how the individual parts of Turing Tumble were made - many of the steps involving manual labor. The final assembly was almost entirely done by hand. Christina sent videos of some of the steps in the process.

After a box was made, it was put on a conveyor belt through an assembly line:

Each person in the line added parts into the bottom of the box. Then they added the second vacuum tray, glued the feet into the board supports, and snapped the board supports in place:

Finally, they taped the long connectors to the top of the vac tray, added the game board on top with a protective piece of tissue paper over the top, and as a final quality control measure, they measured its weight to be sure they didn't forget to add anything.

 They put on the lid, stuck it into a plastic bag...

...and put them each through a machine that heats the bag, making it shrink to fit tightly around the box.

Of course, there were many more steps not shown here, some of them...unexpected. For instance, LongPack thought they'd be able to buy the steel balls prepackaged in bags of 25 each. Instead, over a million balls arrived at their assembly plant unpackaged. LongPack had to quickly devise a way to count out a precise number of balls and put them into little bags. Here's what they came up with:

Pretty smart, but I still feel for the poor soul who drew the short straw and got stuck with that job. When you open your game and you have exactly the right number of balls, remember to take a moment to send brainwaves of gratitude towards Shanghai. 

Overall, production completed without any big problems. Last Thursday we got three final production copies of Turing Tumble and they were 100% spot on. LongPack had their inspector take a look at the games and found only infrequent, very minor imperfections not even worth mentioning here - basically just tiny bits of extra plastic sticking out of a small fraction of parts that can easily be brushed off.

Shipping

The games you ordered are complete! Now they have to find their way across the world to your doorstep without this happening. 

All in all, it looks like our estimate of shipping in May might be optimistic for most of you, but June is safe for almost everyone. Sorry! We're learning a lot as we go - I apologize that you have to be our guinea pigs. And for those of you from Guinea, we're sorry you have to be our pigs.

Remember that shipping is complicated and prone to error. If you think something is wrong with your order, don't hesitate to drop us a line at [email protected].

We're splitting the shipment in 5 directions out of the factory.

US:

All games bound for the US will leave the Shanghai port on 5/7/2018, carried by the APL Southampton to Louisville, Kentucky.

You can follow its progress here. It's estimated to arrive in the Louisville port on 5/20/2018, but then it will take several days to unload. The shipping containers will then be transported by truck to an EasyPost fulfillment center also in Kentucky. There, they'll unload the shipping containers, tear open the cartons, pack individual shipments, and send them off for delivery to individuals.

Canada:

All games bound for Canada will leave the Shanghai port on 5/3/2018, carried by the Hyundai Goodwill to Toronto.  

You can follow its progress here. It's estimated to arrive in the Toronto port on 5/18/2018, but then it will take several days to unload. The shipping containers will then be transported by truck to the BoardGameBliss warehouse. There, they'll unload the shipping containers, tear open the cartons, pack individual shipments, and send them off for delivery to individuals.

EU countries:  

All games bound for the EU will leave the Shanghai port on 5/7/2018, carried by the Marie Maersk to the Southampton port in England.  

You can follow its progress here. It's estimated to arrive in the Southampton port on 6/12/2018. The shipping containers will then be transported by truck to the Spiral Galaxy Games warehouse. There, they'll unload the shipping containers, tear open the cartons, pack individual shipments, and send them off for delivery to individuals all over the EU.

Australia and New Zealand:

We aren't booking this shipment ourselves. We're working with a distributor in Australia named Let's Play Games that managed to get a better rate for shipping than we could. We're not sure quite yet what ship will be used to transport the games to Australia and New Zealand, but the ship has been booked. We wouldn't be surprised if you Australians and New Zealanders end up getting the games before anyone else. Your individual order will also be fulfilled through Let's Play Games.

Everywhere else:

Your order will travel by truck to a VFI warehouse in Shanghai. There, they'll unload the shipping containers, tear open the cartons, pack individual shipments, and send them off for delivery to individuals all over the world. The date you receive your order will depend a lot on where you're located, but you should get it no later than June. Maybe in some unusual cases it will be July - like if you live in Guinea.

Practice Guide and Educator's Guide

When we weren't working on shipping or answering questions about production, we have been creating some useful resources for educators. We just finished creating something we call a "Practice Guide" for Turing Tumble. It's a free companion to Turing Tumble you can download here.

The purposes of the guide are: 

1. To cement important concepts. Practice challenges give another opportunity to apply what you learned. 

2. To offer hints when you’re stuck. Solve a practice challenge or read the explanation of the solution. 

3. To lower the learning curve. To learn how puzzle solutions work. Each solution has an explanation that describes how it works. 

4. To offer the puzzles in an easily printable black and white format. Make as many copies as you like.

Also, Alyssa has been making great progress on the Educator's Guide. We'll notify you all when it's complete.

Thanks again, everyone! We're getting so close now! We can't wait for you to get the game - you're gonna love it.

Paul and Alyssa

Turing Tumble Progress Update #13: Production in Shanghai
about 6 years ago – Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 12:10:53 AM

Friends,

I am about to tell you about one of the most unforgettable experiences of my life. I spent last week in Shanghai with LongPack Games and I got to see Turing Tumble in production.

I had two goals for the trip:

1. To learn. To see how the manufacturing is done - the people involved, the processes, the machinery. Everything.

2. To be a backup for quality control so that I feel confident in the quality of this production run, and also to learn how quality control works so that I don't need to fly out to Shanghai for every future production run.

The People

First of all, let me introduce you to three people from LongPack that have been key to the manufacturing process:

First, meet Christina. Words cannot express just how important her contribution has been to this project. So let me try with numbers. Since we started working with LongPack seven months ago, I've sent 194 emails to her and received 340 back from her. That's roughly 1.7 emails per day on average that she sent to me. And her attention to detail in these emails has been outstanding. Take a look at this email, for instance:

My favorite is section 19, where subdivision into a, b, c, d, and e didn't cut it - section 19, subsection e had to be further divided into <1> and <2>. Without her attention to detail and hard work, this project wouldn't be nearly as close to completion or as high quality as it is now.

CY (right side of picture) has been a great help when it comes to solving mechanical problems. His spoken English and mechanical skills are very good, so he was a great help when we've needed to meet over Skype and troubleshoot complicated issues. For instance, CY was the one that came up with the brilliant idea of using rubber washers to slow down the gear bits.

And this is Sky.

Sky is a wizard when it comes to 3D modeling and injection molding. It was Sky who worked hard to solve the difficult problem with the ramps that I talked about in a previous update. When I sometimes pushed for fast, risky fixes to problems, Sky was the voice of reason and restraint, suggesting more iterative, safe solutions.

The Factories

I was shocked at just how many different suppliers/factories are involved in the production of Turing Tumble. When you consider just the plastic parts, there are at least five different companies involved. We visited four factories while I was there.

Small Part Injection Molding Factory

By the time we arrived at the factory, production had already begun. In fact, five of the parts were already produced!

I took parts from various places inside the bags and they all worked perfectly. They were about as identical as they could be. It was a relief to see just how consistent the parts are from shot to shot. 

At that time, an injection mold machine was making gears for us. 

First, the machine pushes the mold together very tightly, then plastic is injected at high pressure, the mold cools, and finally it opens and the ejector pins push the plastic parts out of the mold. The slowest part of the process is the cooling step. 

Here's a top view that lets you see the ejector pins a little better.

 And here's the result:

In this case, employees manually pulled the gears off and used a knife to cut off any extra plastic. For most other parts, they had a robot arm set up that that automatically pulled off that extra plastic in the middle and dropped it into a separate pile. They had the robot arm set up when they made the bits:

What do they do with all those pieces of junk plastic? They recycle them. First, they chop them up in this machine:

And then they load the chipped up pieces back into the hopper to be melted and molded again.

The injection molds themselves were pretty interesting, too. There were a lot of them in the factory, so I asked to see which of the molds were ours and one of the employees there was kind enough not just to show us, but to open one of them so we could see the inside:

Here's what it looked like:

It turned out that it was good we were there, because Sky actually found a problem with the ramps. Soon after the factory began producing them, we stopped by to check them out and this happened:

Do you see how the ramp second from the bottom was a little slow? Sometimes it would even stop completely. It turns out there was a little gap in one of the 8 mold cavities that left a tiny wedge of plastic sticking out. The wedge rubbed against the board, making it stick. The owner of the factory figured out which of the cavities was the problem by reaching in the machine and grabbing a part from each cavity just after it was molded, but before it was ejected:

That evening, they managed to pull out the mold, fix it, load it back into the machine, and begin producing more ramps. They chopped up all the old ramps and started over. 

We dropped by the next day and they all worked perfectly. That was some pretty incredible customer service. One of the days, they took us out to lunch at a place where we could meet our food before we ate it.

Large Part Injection Molding Factory

We also visited the factory that is making our large plastic parts. The molds for these parts are huge, incredibly heavy, and operate with tremendous pressure. They have to use a hoist mounted on the ceiling to lift the molds into the machines.

While we were there, they were making the board and the board supports. It was a little overwhelming to see so much thought and hard work put into making the parts. You just don't get a sense of that when you send an email from halfway around the world that simply says, "Ok, let's begin production!" Take, for instance, the computer board:

It's pretty clear why that's the most expensive part to produce. And by the way, if you were curious, the reason she presses on the back of the board while it cools is to reduce warp in the board.

While we were there, they were also in the process of producing the board supports.

The two halves of the board support look very similar, but are different. In order to be able to put the board support together, you have to have one of each part. They were worried they might accidentally mix up the two parts, so they had the clever idea of marking an ejector pin on one of them with a '0' and the other with an '8'.

Vacuum Mold Factory

The third factory we visited was the vacuum mold factory. They weren't producing our vacuum trays just then, but I got to see the process:

In the back of this machine is a long roll of sheet plastic. As it's drawn through the machine, the plastic sheet is first heated, then pulled out over a mold and sucked down as the mold is pushed up. Then water jets spray over the hot plastic to cool it before the mold is pulled out from underneath and eventually the formed plastic is chopped off. Here you can see the vacuum forming the plastic:

The next step is to cut out the individual sections. In whatever-the-thing-is-they're-making-in-the-video-above, there are 6 that need to be cut from each sheet of formed plastic.They use a big die cutter to cut them out one by one:

Even though they weren't making the vacuum trays for Turing Tumble that day (they'll be one of the last things produced because they'll take up so much space), I did get to see the molds.

Assembly Factory

The assembly factory is the last step of the production process. It's where they gather all of the parts from the various factories, make the boxes, put parts in little bags, load the boxes with vacuum trays and bags of parts, close them up, shrink wrap them, and put them in cartons to ship out.

The tools in the assembly factory were generally pretty standard except this one. It's the tool that wraps chipboard boxes with paper. I've always wondered how they stretch paper over the outside of boxes without any tears, bubbles, or wrinkles. Well, here it is:

Aha! Now you get it, right? No? Well neither did I, so they slowed the machine down for me and ran it again. See if this helps. They ran a box through without the paper wrapping glued to the bottom so I could more easily see all the steps in the process:

NOW you get it, right? Of course you do. Easy peasy. :) 

Timing

Production is moving along, skillfully coordinated by Christina, and things appear to be running on schedule. Alyssa and I are figuring out the final details of shipping to our fulfillment centers now. We're getting there! May fulfillment is still looking good.

Thank you all again for your support and encouraging words. We're really proud of how it's turned out and I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the final product.

Paul and Alyssa