Zillablog

Happy winters Solstice to everyone! (or whatever you like to celebrate)
Here at Cafe Electric eight more Z2K’s passed all tests with flying colors. That’s a nice relief and seems to confirm that our assembly problems are behind us.  We’re just starting inventory now. After year end accounting I’ll be out of town for a couple weeks. The plan is that Carrie will continue to build Z1K’s targeted for assembly late January and the current batch of Z2Ks will ship as soon as I’m back in the shop. That should be mid January at the latest.

If you are trying to reach me and I don’t respond, it may be a week or so since some of the places I need to visit don’t have phone or internet access.
I hope you all have a wonderful and safe new year,

-Otmar

Hello All,
The fiscal year is coming to close, and shortly we’ll be halting shipping so we can get the books all straightened out and do inventory.
We built one Z2K with the new assembly tricks on Monday and it passed all tests with flying colors, including the EHV ones at about 400 Volts. You know I was seriously flinching when first touching the accelerator on that extra high voltage test! Since then I’ve been abusing it for days just to make sure everything is perfect. So with the confidence of that one working perfectly we are building a few more Z2Ks.

Unfortunately, due to the shortcomings of a very poor bookkeeping program we won’t be able to ship any more product this year unless it already is paid in full. This because Quickbooks, although relatively cheap, is a pretty poor excuse for a bookkeeping program in that it has a terrible time with cash vs accrual reporting. Plus, it doesn’t tell you what data it is using for the reports, very frustrating. As a result, I always have to make my cash and accrual entries be equal at the end of the year. So if you were hoping to still get a Z2K this year, and were one of the next batch, you can blame the delay on Quickbooks.

If you were in the batch of Z2K’s that were last targeted to go out in October we should manage to get three shipped this month and the rest of those will go out mid January.

That’s all for now, got to get back to building Z2K’s.
-Otmar

Hello All,

I apologize for the long delay in posting, I guess it took a while to recover from that fun birthday party. 🙂
All kidding aside, things are looking better at Cafe Electric.

Although the plating on the Z2K parts has not been completely ruled out as a small factor, I have focused my attention to the part finish on the copper. As a result I switched to assembling Z1K’s whose copper parts had better machining. With the new micro-ohm meter for conformation we were able to build many good Zillas. This makes me feel a lot better! We’ve shipped seven Z1K’s since the first of December and expect to ship another eleven units in the next week. This means we will fill orders that were placed late June and before. We still have a large backorder of Z1K’s to build next year, but it feels good to be getting some out.

With the learning gained while building the Z1K’s, I intend to have another look at the Z2Ks next week. I’m hoping that after machining some surfaces and using all the tricks learned with the Z1Ks we’ll get them to test with perfect scores and be ready for shipping Z2Ks once again.

So, as to delivery times, I’ll make some guesses: If you ordered a Z1K before June 26th, it should go out in the next week. The rest will be built next year. Those ordered before August I hope to ship in January. The later ones will come after that.
Z2K’s schedule will depend on the results of next weeks tests. I’ll try to post an update after that time. There is a very large backorder for them as well so I hope to have that process nailed down soon.

As production ramps up again (and the orders keep pouring in) I realize that we could use one more good helper. We’re looking for someone local, meticulous, smart but not a engineer or engineer wannabe, who is reliable, can get things done and who values hard work for a good cause over money (this since we start people at $8/hr and work up from there). If you know of someone, please have them send me a resume in .pdf format.

As always, many thanks for your patience.

-Otmar