[Elecraft] K3 Status Update - 10/17/2007

[Eric Swartz - WA6HHQ, Elecraft]

Hi,

We've been receiving a flood of emails lately asking questions about K3 shipping 
and what we're up to here in Aptos. I apologize that we can not reply to all of 
them as we're totally focused on getting K3s out the door.

We are slowly ramping up in fits and starts and definitely have shipped more 
than just one K3. :-) We'll ship for one day and then pause for a day or two to 
make sure that everything is correct. We'll make small changes to the 
manufacturing process and then ship some more etc. The last week was slower than 
we wanted, mostly due to minor manufacturing glitches, delays printing the 
manuals, making sure the boards were fully tested and getting a regular flow of 
completed PCB assemblies (i.e. complete sets of boards) from our assembly 
sub-contractor. They are finally coming up to speed and it looks like next week 
will be the first time that they will be supplying more board sets to us than we 
can digest and ship daily. That will allow us to get ahead on our testing of 
boards in batches and to run our process more efficiently.

Most of the first shipments have gone out UPS ground and via Priority mail. I 
think only one customer asked for it overnight, and that one went out today. As 
a result many of them are just receiving their K3s now and may not start 
building them until this weekend. The customers we've shipped to so far were 
very early orders from Visalia etc. and we've been closely communicating with 
them to make sure they received everything that was supposed to be there and 
that there were no major problems building and getting the kit running. :-) 
These are regular customers, but we are being very careful to make sure that we 
do not ship a large number of K3s with infant problems (in the kit or printed 
docs.) A number of them are bringing up their kits now and I expect you will see 
more postings beginning next week. Just this morning we got news one of them is 
100% up and running and very happy. Also remember than not all of our customers 
are on the Elecraft list and some even do not use email. (Less than 50% of the 
customers in our database are on the Elecraft list.)

So far we've been shipping just kits to keep everything under control. Next week 
we will begin shipping some fully built rigs too. We brought up the first 
factory built K3 today (that will ship to a customer who ordered it as the first 
built K3 at Visalia) and it is fully functional, going through final burn-in and 
test right now.

We're being careful and conservative - trying to make sure quality trumps 
quantity in these early shipping days. In any case, I think we should see an 
increase of K3 owner comments starting some time next week. (And more K3 
shipments too!)

73, Eric   WA6HHQ
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