Hey everyone, here are April 2025 production updates.
Building Expansion
March was highlighted with the first half of our expansion in our current building, where we moved our desks upstairs to a new office space allowing us to make room for the downstairs to expand production. Our upstairs, being around 6000sqft will be used for general desk work and meetings, housing our customer service, engineering, administration, and marketing departments. Things like our prototyping and production offices are remaining downstairs.
We are expecting to knock down a wall sometime this summer to add another 3000sqft of downstairs space from our neighbours next door who are planning to expand into office space next to theirs as well. It’ll be a bit of shuffling around for everyone.
US Canada Tariffs
For latest news on tariffs, please visit our article here.
We’re expecting more news to come out April 2nd, at which point we will work out another message for everyone to keep folks update about the situation.
gSender is Getting a New Look!
Education
We are slowly expanding our business reach by exploring the education sector. We’ve now opened up ordering for schools and institutions through our education form. This is if you’re representing a school or institution and may require more specific ordering and payment processes.
Spindle Certification
Earlier last month we were in touch with ESA about having proper certifications for the H100 VFD that is used as part of the AltMill Spindle and Dust Shoe Kit and the LongMill Spindle and Dust Shoe Kit. As far as we understand, they require us to have certain safety certifications for this unit to be used in Ontario. Because of this, we’ve reached out to customers in Ontario who may already have this and paused the sale of this VFD within Canada. Once we have completed it, we will resume the sale of this item.
At the time of writing, we’re working with a certification body to safety certify the VFD, and we’ve contacted any customers who might be affected directly with more info and additional updates if necessary. From what we have learned, we may need to produce a modified version of the enclosure that complies with certain standards, but keeps the same internal parts. We’ve consulted with the certification firm and are in production of an updated VFD enclosure now and expect it to be completed in the next few weeks.
At the time of writing, as well, we have not heard any reports of injury or damage. While this does not necessarily imply that the unit is unsafe, the ESA has asked us to comply with their directive for compliance.
AltMill
Most of March was spent preparing for the big shipping push this April. Now that we’ve cleared out of stock on AltMill MK1s, all new machines going out will be MK2s.
We are expecting to start shipping machines at the start of April, and aim to push 200 units per month, or 50 units per week until stock runs out again. We’ve just received parts for both AltMill 4×4 and 2×4!
As we mentioned prior, we’re gradually building up larger amounts of stock to decrease lead times for AltMill, and we estimate around 50 pallets of parts stocked up at a secondary warehouse now to help fulfill demand.
LongMill
After a short pause on shipping of LongMills, due to a shortage of SLB case parts, we are now back to a 1-3 business day lead time. This means all LongMills will ship within a few days.
gControl Panel Computer
gControls are back and we have another 500 units to ship out. We’re expecting to have around 150-200 units in stock after we clear our queue, or another 2ish months of stock. We’ll be starting another batch of 500 as soon as we’ve cleared the queue so that we don’t have another backlog again.
AutoSpin T1 Router
Exciting news! We’ve now received the first batch of AutoSpin T1 Routers for beta testing. We received a total of 35 routers for our first batch of testing, which have gone out to LongMill, Onefinity, Shapeoko, and other CNC users.
Once beta testing is complete and we’ve finalized the details, we’ll be starting production in the next few weeks. Johann and Daniel are in China to visit the factory which these will be produced in to figure the last few details, and we expect us to get units ready for sale in about 3-4 months.