Hey Backers & Friends! 

We're not supercharged just yet, but we're working hard on it! 

TL;DR:------------

• Production scaling up, currently at 3 turbines/week, aiming for 5/week by mid-September.
• Hiring more staff and improving quality control processes.
• Tweaks made to 3D print production for better fit and robustness.
• Solved squeaky noises and bad tolerances in the gear system.
• Shipping delayed due to waiting for bags.
• Offer to ship turbines without bags to EU customers who don't mind waiting.
• Shipped 24 turbines, produced up to serial number 34.
• Goal is to have 10 faultless turbines before in-situ testing not needed.
• Faced a storm with five turbines, one failed due to a re-calibration issue, which has been fixed.
• Firmware updates in progress for stability, performance, and optimizations.
• 3D printer farm is operational with an improved filament drying chamber.

Production

We're working hard on scaling up. Everything takes a little longer - or we are a little slower, but production is ongoing, and we're push forwards on many small things. 

We have hit production output around 3 turbines per week here in August, and aiming at 5 per week in mid September. We'll continue ramping production as we hire new people. This is ongoing. 

We've are hiring more people to the production. We've done a lot of work into quality checklists and control system that will ease the handover of task to people who have not tried them before. This process was a little slower than anticipated. 

We've iterated once again on the 3D print production, and the ironed out few kinks, and made some tweaks here and there to a lot of parts. This is mainly fit - more robustness towards tolerance variations and stuff like this. 

Squeaky noises / bad tolerances, from gear system solved (at least we have a lot of confidence) 

This was a point from last update, and we've now come to a solution for this. We're not seeing this issue anymore. We've been running indoor tests to confirm and verify as well.  

Next production milestone in September is getting two more employees for the production, and getting the numbers up to 5 turbines / week.   

Shipping

Currently, we're reaching out to backers to hear who are ready to receive their turbines. - BUT we're still waiting for the bags to arrive. And some of you have said you'd like to wait till we have that ready. 

We are REALLY bottle necked by the bags. So if anyone from EU want's their turbines now, and their bags later. Do let us know! :) Then we'll aftership the bags. 

Currently, we've shipped out turbine number 24, and we have turbines made serial numbers 34.  

Other milestones

Reach 10 turbines without faults: We're up to 8 now. Then we'll only take turbines out "batch-wise" to the test site to for in-situ testing. This is quite a time-sink, but it's necessary - AND we also discovered a issue that we were able to solve:

Another storm (almost) successfully handled

We're up to 5 turbines, but then a storm hit, and we had one turbine (of 4) fail. BTW: We handled another storm! The good thing in the storm was that the turbines (that did not fail) handled it brilliantly, and we also found the mistake. 

It was a turbine re-calibration issue, where the re-calibration would be too slow, and the turbine would overspeed leading to a guy-wire hit. 

We have bumped the re-calibration speed up to 3-4x now. (And it only happened to 1 of 4 turbines). So now the chance of this happening again are minimal. 

Test, test, test! It really shows the importance. 

Cardboard boxes: 

Seems to be working, but we're closely monitoring the status on the delivered turbines. So far we're still in a learning phase on packing the turbines nicely and safely. 

Firmware: 

We've done some updates to firmware - nothing released publicly yet, as more testing is required. But this is some stability issues, better performance and "behind the scenes" optimizations. 

Lastly; 3D printer farm is up and running with even better filament drying chamber. 

That's it for now! 
May you have strong winds!  

 KiteX Team