I know everyone is eagerly waiting for dial cover production to resume! Sale of the business was completed with Mark about 3 weeks ago and I spent 3 days with him training. Transferring 20 years of knowledge would be an impossible task but he was able to teach me the basic concepts of his process for the various types of dials. From there it will just take time and experience to get up to speed. We hauled a trailer full of items back to PA and have since started setting up shop.
I spent 2 weeks sorting and storing over 1000 molds in a 4 stack of old blueprint file cabinets. That step has finally been completed. I bought a wall oven for the shop and finished building a cart for that to love on and store more tooling for production. I need to finish running a new circuit to get that fired up and then I can start doing some test runs.
As you can see I've been making good progress on building a new web site and the basic structure to build out the catalog is in place. Progress is not as quick as we would like but we still work full time jobs (at least for a few more years) so this all goes on during nights and weekends. The new site will feature fully automated check out and payment that should make purchasing much easier for you and filling orders for us.
I have started a request list, so if you have a model you are waiting to have a dial made, please send a message and we will add you to the list. I will start production and adding to the catalog based on this list. One of the big changes from the past is I will be making a batch of each dial as I get requests and the extras will go into stock. It's much easier to make 10-20 dials while tooled up for that dial then to constantly switch after making 1. Over time this should allow us to fill orders straight from stock and keep lead times very short on dials. The web site will show how many are in stock.
Keep an eye on this site and I will do blog updates as things progress. I will also post here when the time comes announcing models as they get added to the catalog and available to purchase. I'll be at Kutztown on Friday the 18th at table 152 so come say hi!
Thanks!
Mike & Jess Beatty