Welcome back! Here’s our September 2026 Production Update.
New careers page
We have a new careers page! Learn more about the company and check out latest openings here.
Bit giveaways are coming back
If you guys remember a few years ago, we used to just randomly give away bit and end mills and other random stuff. There was no entry, although we had a theme typically each week. We basically just wanted to give some little thank you’s to members of the community that were sharing their cool projects and knowledge to educate and inspire our community.
We did stop doing that for some time, mostly because we got really busy with other stuff. But I’m excited to announce that with our larger, growing team, we’re able to invest more time and effort into the little fun things I know we all enjoy.
Anyhow, feel free to share and engage with the community on CNC stuff! And maybe you’ll get some cool stuff in return!
Changes to our lead time tracking philosophy
To be frank here, we’ve made some of our customers unhappy with our wishy washy approach to our lead times. To those people, I’m sorry, we will do better.
To address this, we’ve made a few changes to our back end processes and to some effect, our customer facing communication as well. Here’s a few problems we’ve identified.
At the root, I feel like we’ve been wishy washy on lead times because we are worried about making promises we can’t keep, so we continued to broaden and pad our lead times to avoid disappointing people. But the reality is that imprecise processes lead to imprecise results. For example, when we listed our estimated lead times or shipping times, we typically tell people which month their item will ship.
But a month is a long time, and when it will ship is ambiguous. Will it ship at the start of the month? Will it ship at the end of the month? The customer doesn’t know. So what did we change?
- Rather than putting the estimated time to completion, we have an exact date for the completion.
- We will aim to ship by or before that date
- With an exact date, we will have an exact reference for when we need to inform customers if their order is expected to be delayed, so that we can be proactive on informing customers
We’ve rolled out this system over the last few weeks, and we’re getting things ironed out, but the team is working to adapt this.
Additionally, we’re moving away from month estimates, for example “item is expected to ship in September”, to a lead time defined by a number of weeks. Why did we switch?:
- As our production volumes scale up, we expect to build less in batches and more in a continual basis. In the past, we managed inventory in batches, so we would build, for example, 1000 machines at a time. However, this contributes to huge swings in inventory. For components that are smaller or less expensive, we could buy much more, while large or expensive items would be made in smaller batches. However, the quantity of parts we order each time is not limited to the size of the batch anymore
- We can start better scheduling production for each product on a week to week basis, according to what products are slated to reach their ship date. This means that rather than building an arbitrary number of machines, we have an actual minimum number we need to build each day or week
- We can keep track of our timeliness. We can see what percentage of machines we are actually shipping on time, and if we need to make any adjustments to our processes or production capacity accordingly.
We understand, especially as more and more of our customers are moving to building business around their machines, that timeliness is important. And so to reflect this understanding, we will continue to work on improving our processes and decrease lead times.
24 months ago, our average lead time for the AltMill 4×4 was around 17 weeks. Now machines are shipping on average in 0.7 weeks.
“Starter Kits” now available for AltMill 2×4, 4×4, and 4×8
https://sienci.com/product-category/altmill/starter-kits
We just posted starter kits available on our store for the AltMill line. As you guys may or may not know, we set up the LongMill Beginners Kits way back because we wanted to have a simple package for people to be able to order with basically everything you need to get started. Since then, at least according to Nathan, about 80% people get the beginners kit.
We also wanted to be able to pre-pack stuff because we can have stuff prepped in advance and have shorter lead times, so we also made the price slightly less than buying everything separately.
AltMill 4×8
It’s an exciting month as we’ve now received enough parts to build another 300 AltMill 4x8s! We have now started shipping out the remaining 4×8 machines that are in the queue.
Lead times are expected to be approximately 4 weeks after order. We expect lead times to start coming down as we continue pre-assembly for components.
ATC
Parts for the ATC arrived this past month and we are pushing out more ATCs each week. We’re expecting to ship around 32 units per week until we clear the queue.
For new orders at the time of writing, we are expecting another batch of 90 spindle parts to arrive Oct 10th, which means that any new orders placed now will start shipping in mid-Oct. Once the parts arrive, we expect to be building around 30 units per week. We are expecting another batch of parts for another 70 spindle units to come in November as well. Lead times will be adjusted based on sales demand, but we anticipate being able to build and pre-pack some ATCs so that we can keep lead times lower moving forward from there.
LongMill MK3
We have started assembly process for LongMill MK3 in August and have been working to prep for shipping this month. At the time of writing (Aug 25th), we should be getting the rest of our packaging materials tomorrow. Based on our current schedule and assembly times, we are expecting the first machines to start shipping mid-Sept.
I thought it would be interesting to look at price changes for the LongMill since 2019 when it first came out to today, with the first graph being the list price (USD), and the second graph adjusted for inflation. Although the price for the LongMill list price hasn’t changed too much, when you adjust for inflation, we actually got value cost back down to close to our first version.
What contributes to the change in pricing? Here are some reasons:
- Substantially higher production volume means more efficient production cost
- Improved quality. While the cost of producing precision parts has gone up, this also means that our other costs like replacements and customer service costs have gone down
- Engineering optimization, namely the electronics. Redesigned electronics has reduced cost by nearly 50% while being several magnitudes more powerful and reliable.
Additionally, the LongMill MK3 is around 3x more rigid and 2x faster than the LongMill MK1. I figured I would share this to contextualize the big leaps we’ve made in the industry.
Anyhow, in the grand scheme of things, things haven’t picked up in demand for the the new LongMill MK3 yet, and I think it’s mostly because the world hasn’t seen how amazing it is yet. And there’s a lot of stuff that people won’t really get to experience until they get their hand on it, so I’m really excited to be shipping these machines out soon!
AltMill Clear Cut Dust Shoe
Ok these have been a bit of a PITA, but I’m excited to share that we have a large batch of Clear Cut Dust Shoes coming in mid-Sept and are now up for sale.
We had a bunch of little issues with the dust shoe that kind of pushed the timelines for offering these up for general sale. First was that we had some quality issues with the molding where parts would come out weak or cracking. Another major issue was dealing with magnets coming out or not being installed correctly. We’ve since worked to resolve these issues and been pushing the manufacturing for these.
To ensure that we had enough dust shoes, we’ve mainly stuck to prioritizing selling the dust shoes with the spindles, as we mainly designed the dust shoes to work with our spindles, but we do want to make them available for everyone.
I’m happy to announce that we should be getting around 600 more units soon for individual orders in the next few weeks, and we’ll have another 3000 more coming in mid-Oct. Given that we sold out the 150 units in 2 days when we first launched these in Feb 2026, we anticipate we should move through these pretty quickly.
Ontario CSA compliant power supplies
We continue to work towards offering power supplies for AltMill users in Ontario, with the expected completion date in November. We’ve now completed the design phase and expect to start the certification and testing process this month. We have been working with Intertek in the design phase so we are confident that the certification will proceed in a timely manner.
Also side note, someone was asking about 220V compatibility. The LongMill MK3 will be both 110V and 220V compatible. The new certified power supplies are also dual voltage, but due to safety standards we can only certify one voltage at a time, but we’ll look into doing things for both.
An even bigger ATC?
Last year we foreshadowed the potential release of larger spindles by showing off the AltMill with a 4.5KW spindle. As you guys might know, with the AltMill’s rigidity, it can easily handle larger spindles. However we started off with 1.5KW and 2.2KW spindles as they are more accessible for most users.
If you wanna see the video of our testing from last year…
Well over the last couple months we’ve been playing around with a 4.5KW spindle, which works with the same type of electronics and system as our current 2.2KW ATC. This comes as a substantial potential option for increasing productivity for our pro-level and production level users.
We still have a lot of work scaling up production and getting our lead times down for the 2.2KW ATC, so that still continues to be our main focus, but figured I should share this as work comes together for the larger ATC.
SLB EXT V2 and SLB Lite
The first batch of SLB-Lites have arrived to our shop! We’re excited to start rolling this out into building the LongMill MK3s. We’ve successfully tested and flashed the first 350 units, which will go in to the first LongMill MK3 kits. Otherwise we are continuing to work on development for the SLB-EXT V2 used for AltMill.
New gControl?
gSender team and the engineering team as a whole have been absolutely cooking with the imminent shift towards on-board machine computing.
As we mentioned in previous updates, we want to build a new version of the gControl panel computer to make it substantially cheaper.
There have been a number of bonus improvements as we continue going down this path including:
- Improvements to UI, as we move towards a more touch-focused interface
- Improved process for connecting your phone to gSender (for controlling your machine remotely on your phone)
- And more…