We are spinning a tangled web of spider parts at the moment working to finish this project. Marrowgnaw ended up requiring larger silicone molds than we expected and is caused us some capacity problems in resin. Although her final parts aren't huge, to make sure the parts are cast well, we needed thicker mold walls. We could only fit about 1/3 of a full spiders worth of parts in a resin pot at a time. Each pot takes about 10-12 minutes to turn so we would be looking at 30 additional working days of casting spider parts in resin!
What we are did to remedy that lead time was move her legs and howdah mud flaps over to Siocast and the howdah railings over to 3D prints. We've got more capacity in those manufacturing work cells and they can run parallel with resin casting and keep us on track. That will leave us with only the chunky spider butts, bodies and the howdah in resin which really is the best use of a resin process.
Butts, Bodies and a Howdah too!
New Spider Leg molds that will last 500 shots!
Comparison of silicone mold that last about 25 shots to the siocast spider legs. So much less material required.
Moving the railings from resin to 3D print saves a lot of wasted material for the tiny parts too. The mold only lasts about 25 shots and 3D prints have no parting lines. Printing is great for smaller things like this. The following picture is a comparison of the larger mold and 2 master sprue castings to the 3D print sprue. We get about 30 prints on a tray and will will finish these parts in 2 days in our printer module. As opposed to the week of mold making and another week of casting 500 parts.
Material conservation at its finest!
MANUFACTURING
We are about 80% done with all the other castings and packaging of the characters and larger number of warrior and lackey packs. This will dovetail in with Marrowgnaw manufacturing so we can finish this project in September. Below is a compilation of various stages of parts from mold masters, resin casting, siocast printing and packaging. I built this from various photos of the process during the shop walk around this week. As you can tell, there is a lot that goes into making 18,000 goblins and 600 spiders!
And finally, Ainsley conducts a careful inspection of Looty the loot goblin...
PHYSICAL FULFILLMENT
Reassigning the parts to different processes puts us delivering to our original plan of September, but it is sure aggravating moving along at a nice clip and all of a sudden slowing down to a school zone pace.
We've already locked the addresses and intend to start shipping this month. We will start with the simple goblin boxes since they don't have a spider. There's about 50 of those and their contents are complete. Then we will move on to the full kits right after. The shipments will proceed in this order...
The basic goblin boxes will start shipping in the next week. There's about 50 of those.
All Australia shipments will be bundled and sent to our partners in Sydney. It takes about 3-4 weeks for those to get to the backer so we want those going on their way. There's another 50 in the batch.
We will proceed with shipping the rest that have Marrowgnaw and go by Backer ID in order. The caveat being we will likely ship internationals on a specific day of the week because the customs forms can be tricky and we don't want to make any mistakes. Fortunately there are only about 50 of those too.
DIGITAL FULFILLMENT
The digital fulfilment of the project is complete and if you are missing your invitation emails please let us know. Everyone who backed this project received a digital invitation from MyMiniFactory for all the files.
That wraps up this update. We are excited to start the physical fulfilment process and finish this project up. If you have questions, don't hesitate to send an inquiry to [email protected].
