[Elecraft] K3 STATUS

[Bruce Bowman]

I have to agree.

You probably recall this pearl of engineering scheduling wisdom:

"The first 90% of the work takes the first 90% of the schedule; the 
remaining 10% of the work takes the other 90% of the schedule."

When you're exploring new territory, sometimes there are surprises and 
you have to deal with them one at a time. Yeah, once you're into 
production you can do a much better job of forecasting, but this isn't 
production yet. They may be out of design development, but they've only 
started manufacturing development. What we're talking about here- and 
waiting for- are production prototypes that are defining the 
manufacturing and testing processes thru which all following producution 
must follow. Each of these K3s are being nurtured to life by hand. It's 
going to get better, but not yet. I'm willing to bet that the mfg. 
documents look like somebody bled on them from each days accumulated 
redlines!

The inferred good news from all this is that we so far haven't heard 
that the design has changed. That says a lot for the thoroughness of the 
design phase and will hopefully make the passage to true production less 
troublesome.

Bruce, NM5B
Santa Fe, NM


> ... I've worked in engineering too long.  I know that you cannot 
> believe
> an engineer when he gives you a schedule.  Sorry, but we engineers are
> not good at it.  Elecraft is doing their best and fortunately for us,
> their best means we get a great performing radio that is a great 
> price.
> Personally, I've taken every schedule from Elecraft with a large grain
> of salt, thus keeping my expectations rather low.