Category: Production Updates

Hey everyone, happy July!

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In general news, we’ve done a few things in the past few weeks:

• A new batch of end mills have arrived from our manufacturer and are being packed. New bit packs should be restocked by the time this post comes out
• We’ve officially signed all of the paperwork for our new office. This means we’ll start moving in August 2023 with partial access. Starting October 2023, we’ll have full access.

Content Insight Survey

Hey guess what! We just passed our 7000th subscriber on Youtube! If you didn’t know, we make tons of how-to, assembly, and tutorial videos on our channel.

Our team wants to keep making amazing content. If you want to help us figure out what we’re doing next, make sure to take our Content Insight Survey, which will help us understand what content you like and what we should be focusing

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeDnCmhtGyHiGcHjle54Rbs8bT8OokMTe3MPa22pOjxpPFOBQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

Vortex Rotary Axis

The Vortex Rotary Axis was launched on June 1st! We now have about half of the batch accounted for, interested customers can still get on the pre-order. This launch was probably the smoothest product launch we’ve ever had. Although some customers weren’t able to make a purchase right at the time we opened up orders due to some website caching, after we had that cleared up, the rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I just want to thank and congratulate everyone who worked on this project as all of the prep work, testing, and resource development that went into this product made sure we had a smooth launch.

Production for the Vortex Rotary Axis has been ramping up, as we get things made up and printed for shipping in late July. We’ve now received most of the parts for the Rotary Axis, and the last remaining parts we are still waiting on are expected to be ready in the first week of July.

There has also been a substantial amount of resource development done for the Vortex, some of which is now being uploaded to the Vortex Resources. You won’t see everything on there yet much of it is in draft form, we are getting everything ready and set up for launch.

LongMill and Extension Kits

We continue to have fairly short lead times on LongMills, however, we are running low on control boards which may increase lead times for some customers. We expect to reach the end of Batch 8 in August, and have around 270 units left in stock. Pending delivery of new control boards, lead times are expected to be 1-2 weeks, but could extend later this month to +3 weeks. Once we receive the new control boards, we expect lead times to go down again.

Lead times are expected to be short for the time being, but lead times may vary a bit depending on how quicky we can get a few kinks resolved including:

• We are running low on controller board parts, and we are expecting to restock in the first or second week of July
• Some rails from production are twisted out of spec. We are currently shipping rails that are within spec, and are waiting on replacements to be made.
• Some poor threading on T12 Delrin nuts means we are making replacements currently. We expect them to be completed in the next 1-2 weeks, but we don’t expect this to be a bottleneck since we still have quite a few in stock.

We are working hard to get ready for the busy season coming up this fall, which means doing lots of pre-packing, restocking and prep!

We have a few other things coming down the pipeline, but this is all for today. Make sure to stay tuned for the next update.

Happy June everyone. I am sure the rest of the team shares this sentiment when I say we are enjoying the sunnier weather.

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You can also read last month’s production update here: https://sienci.com/2023/05/01/may-2023-production-updates/

LongMill and Extension Kit Orders

As we go into the summer season when things start to slow down in terms of orders, we’ve been catching up with the rest of the queue. We also increased staff to speed up our packing. We now have a turnaround time of just a few days. There are a few items we are running low on, such as the Delrin Anti-Backlash nuts and the v-wheels, but our new order should be arriving in the next week or two.

The past half year has been pretty busy, as this is the first time since August/September 2022, or almost 9 months that we’ve been able to get caught up. Even though it seems like a really long time for us to get caught up, during this time, we also experienced orders nearly double over the last few months, which means we’ve been playing catch up.

May has historically been the slowest time of the year for us as well, but we expect things to start to ramp up significantly in August. You can see the trends below.

Last month in May, we mentioned our extrusion die being damaged unexpectedly. The silver lining to this however is that with the fresh die, we are getting better tolerances across the length of the rail. For those not familiar, extrusion dies have to be replaced over time once the die wears and the profile changes shape to enough of a degree that the extrusion it produces is not of the correct dimensions. This means that the quality of the new Y rails should be slightly better than before.

A recent batch of T12 lead screws has arrived, with half of them being out of spec. Due to bends in the screw, we’ve been working on a way to straighten them out. Although in the long run, our priority is to make sure that they are straightened by the manufacturer, due to the large number of bent screws, we wanted to figure out a way to fix them if possible. We expect to receive the full batch of lead screws in the coming weeks, so we’ll have stock available.

While we have some QA issues to tackle, since we have parts stocked up, we expect to be able to go through our existing parts for the time being.

This lull period will allow us to divert energy into the production and assembly of the Rotary Axis, as we expect to see parts start to arrive this month.

Parts for Batch 8 continue to trickle in, with a significant number of parts slated to arrive over the next two months.

We are at the last third of machines in Batch 7, and we expect to go into Batch 8 around August 2023.

LaserBeam Orders

New LaserBeam orders are shipping generally within 2 weeks, but usually faster.

Vortex Rotary Axis

Preorders for the Vortex Rotary Axis will be available for pre-order on June 1, 2023 at 1PM Eastern Standard Time and is expected to ship in August 2023. All important details can be found in this article.

We are expecting parts to start arriving in the coming weeks, and we are prepping assembly and QA for the Rotary units. We’ve started receiving production, and we are expecting the last batch of parts to complete production around mid-July.

Price increase on Makita RT0701 Router

Due to price increases from our supplier earlier this year, we’ve increased the price for the Makita RT0701 from $150CAD to $165CAD.

Shipping Holdups from UPS from Canada to the US

We have now obtained our US EIN number and set up an entity in the US to help facilitate shipments from Canada to the US. Over the last few months, we’ve generally seen fewer holdups, but they are still occurring. Once we get everything set up, we hope that number will drop to zero.

We just set up US bank accounts so that we can also start setting up payment processors in the US. Although for most customers this probably won’t make any impact, this means that we can save on some banking and cross-border fees that happen due to the fact we are doing everything through our Canadian banking network.

There continues to be a bit of friction setting this up, since there are a few extra steps, such as setting up a physical mailing address that can forward mail to us to Canada, learning about the US tax system, and fixing some technical issues with our payment processor as we switch over.

Here is your May 2023 Production Updates. For all news and updates, please see our Blog.

Just as a reminder, if you’d like to get these updates as a weekly email newsletter, please subscribe here: https://sienci.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=720f140325aaa668a8aa09916&id=e18d59a085

Resource and content development

I’m excited to share that we’ve recently hired two new technical writers and resource developers and a second videographer to help continue to bring awesome instructions, troubleshooting, projects, and content to the community and our users! Some of the things our new team members will be working on include:

• Creating tutorials and projects
• Writing and improving information in our online resources
• Additional involvement in the online community, through our social media and forums
• Helping create documentation for new products
• Sharing more news about our company and the amazing things we’re working on

We hope that by continuing to share our information, knowledge, and wisdom of hobby CNCing, we’ll continue to make CNCing more accessible for everyone. For more info about why resource development is important to us, please check out this article.

LongMill and Extension Kit Orders

In April, last month, we ran into some part shortages for the Y-axis rails due the extrusion die getting damaged unexpectedly. This pushed back production by about 2 weeks while the broken die was remade. We have received the rails and have been able to ship a large number of machines. We also ran out of the front and back steel feet for a few days, but we have also received a new batch last week as well. We believe that we should be able to ship most of the units with a turnaround of 4 weeks, better than the 5-6 weeks we promised, but we expect to run out of T12 lead screws in the next coming weeks, so we will continue to have a 5-6 week lead time listed on our product page in case there are delays in receiving our next batch.

Otherwise, although we have had to pause shipping at times, we have been continuing to deliver within the promised times for our customers. Additionally, we have recently brought on a few new staff to help continue to bring lead times down.

I should note that due to the high volume of orders we are processing, we are finding that on some days, due to space constraints of the truck picking up orders, some items may need to wait for the next truck to ship. Since we are trying to clear the backlog, it’s a bit slower than usual, but we expect things to ship out without delays once we get caught up.

Our engineers have been working on a few new projects to help improve the productivity of production in a couple of different areas. One notable update is with our tapping setup. We do hole tapping in several different areas, including with the ends of the rails and several of the gantries and feet that make up the LongMill. With our original setup, we used a tool to tap each hole individually. However, our engineers are trying a few new ways to tap several holes simultaneously with a special jig by essentially driving multiple tapping heads at the same time. With each batch needing tens of thousands of holes tapped, we expect these new tools to greatly speed up the tapping process.

LaserBeam Orders

A new batch of laser drivers recently arrived at the shop and we are currently processing our queue. We expect to have the rest of the pending orders cleared by this week. We expect to have a fairly short lead time of around 2 weeks going forward based on part availability.

SuperLongBoard

We’ve had an overwhelming response to the SuperLongBoard, with over 400 survey respondents. If you didn’t read the full article, you can check it out here. Thank you, everyone, for your support!

Based on the results, it’s very clear to see that our users are very excited about this massive upgrade to the LongMill and for the future of the hobby CNC industry.

Our team and team and Expatria continue to work on the development of the board. We don’t have any major updates yet, but a few things we’re working on include:

• Enclosure design
• Compute module integration
• Testing and QA jigs

Rotary Axis

We are reaching the final stages of rotary axis development. We have now placed orders for just about all of the parts and are waiting for things to ship. Our gSender development team has now implemented rotary axis functionality in the Edge version (our beta, experimental public version of gSender for internal and external testing). You can learn more about the release here: https://forum.sienci.com/t/gsender-hal-rotary-support-early-alpha/8462.

Additionally, are currently fine-tuning the homing sequence for the rotary axis which will allow the machine to self-home, zero, and align the rotary axis, which is unique to any rotary axis system in the hobby market.

Our team, primarily Daniel and Johann have been vigorously testing and fine-tuning the Rotary Axis over the last few weeks with some amazing projects and results.

We expect to have launch dates, interviews, pricing, and new content to come out soon in the next 2 weeks so make sure to stay tuned!

In today’s production news, please welcome Kelsey’s (our office manager) latest creation, a healthy baby boy.

Hey everyone, here are the production updates for this month.

For all news and updates, please see our Blog.

Just as a reminder, if you’d like to get these updates as a weekly email newsletter, please subscribe here: https://sienci.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=720f140325aaa668a8aa09916&id=e18d59a085

We’re moving (soon)!

In the last update, we talked about our search for a new home. Well, I’m excited to share that we’ve signed a new lease! Our new home will be a few minutes away from our current space in Waterloo, but offer double the square footage plus much higher ceilings, allowing us to store a significantly more amount of material.

At this time, there are a couple of moving parts the most important being that the current tenants occupying the back half of the building until October. Although we’ll have access to the front half of the building in the coming months, we won’t be able to fully set things up without access to the back space and the loading docks.

To allow for some transition time, we’ve extended our lease in our current building til December 2023, so that we don’t have to move everything all at once.

Update on customs hold-ups for US customers

I’m happy to mention that for the most part, the number of shipments that are being held up has decreased. We’ve made some changes to our documentation which seems to have been helping with the situation. We’ve also been working on finalizing the registration of our US corporation to help facilitate orders going to the US. There were some conflicting information and changes to the plan for establishing a US entity that caused this to drag further than we wanted, but we’ve finally started with the next step in the registration that would allow us to get our own EIN and TIN numbers.

After this step, we’ll still need to work on a couple of other things, such as US tax compliance and banking-related stuff, but I am sure we’ll figure each thing out over the next month or two.

LongMill and Extension Orders

Production on LongMill and Extension orders have been a bit up and down as we running low of certain parts needed for the 48×30 machines. At this current time, we are waiting on a new batch of Y axis rails to arrive. Due to the extrusion die being damaged during handling, the rails are still in production. Machines are expected to continue to ship on schedule at 5-6 weeks but shipping rates might not be consistent week to week.

There have also been a few design changes to the ACME locking nuts and couplers that will be reflected in the latest version of the LongMill. The new design helps reduce the chance of rubbing on the support bearings on each end of the machine lead screw. We’ll have the new documentation go live soon. This should help alleviate some of the issues that customers have at start of assembly where they have a binding in one of the axis.

Earlier this year, we hired a couple of new people for the packing team, but we’re still working through catching up.

LaserBeam Orders

We’ve received a new shipment of parts and are expecting the queue for the LaserBeam to be complete in the next week or two. We are currently in the middle of new production for the driver boards, which are expected to finish in a few weeks. We are keeping our lead time estimates to 4-6 weeks, just in case we run out of any parts, but for the most part, we expect orders to ship sooner than that.

Rotary Axis

Production for the rotary axis kit is now underway, with parts for the first 300 units in production. We are working on finalizing the details for the electronics and software, and expect to have a pre-order launch available in the next few weeks. While initially, we were planning to integrate an off-the-shelf rotary axis kit into the LongMill, we’ve decided to fully design the rotary axis from scratch. We found that integrating an off-the-shelf solution would be a reasonably fast and affordable way to set up a 4th axis, there were a couple of compromises we didn’t want to make, such as the form factor, ease of setting up a mounting solution to the wasteboard, and the ability for us to integrate certain features of the rotary axis, such as a way to home and probe off the rotary that would be difficult to accomplish without significant modification to the original design.

There are more details to come, but we feel that the new rotary axis allows for the same type of projects but in a much more user friendly and compact design.

Also if you haven’t seen it yet, check out our debut of the rotary axis in our 2023 April Fools video!

Hey everyone, here are the production updates for this month.

For all news and updates, please see our Blog.

Just as a reminder, if you’d like to get these updates as a weekly email newsletter, please subscribe here: https://sienci.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=720f140325aaa668a8aa09916&id=e18d59a085

Update on customs hold-ups for US customers

Many US customers with LongMill orders may be experiencing a hold-up at the border for LongMills. For more information about the situation and what it means to you, if you are waiting on a shipment, please read our post here: https://sienci.com/2023/02/21/us-customs-hold-ups-in-detroit/

We have not seen a decrease in these hold-ups, and we are still working on some solutions for this. At this time, we’re working on:

• Looking at a new shipping software that can improve the quality of documentation to reduce hold-ups
• Talking with the Canadian Trade Commissioners and US Border for additional help and information
• Working on consolidating shipments and working on the classifications for our products
• Looking at alternative distribution methods and production methods

We have also been establishing a US entity, which means that very soon we will have a US corporate presence (and a lot more paperwork to fill out).

Because some of the bits and parts are being made in China and are on invoices, certain items are now being charged an additional 25% duty due to the Trade War (China Section 301-Tariff Actions and Exclusion Process) which was established several years ago but lax on enforcement. However starting this year, we are now being charged extra for duties and taxes.

At this time, we continue to cover the costs of duties and taxes for US customers. We hope to find a way to mitigate some of these duties and taxes soon.

It should be noted that order under $800USD regardless of the origin of the items being shipped, that enter the US, are not charged duties and taxes. You can learn more about de-minimis here: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/de-minimis-value-increases-800

LongMill MK2 and Extension Kit Production

Sales for machines have been extremely high at the start of this year, with an 84% growth in revenue from last year this time. The LongMill MK2 has now been in production and shipping for 1 year! We are expecting that before the end of this year, the LongMill MK2 will surpass our population of LongMill MK1s which was released in March 2019 and was in production for about 3 years.

Our sales at the end of 2022 and going into 2023 have been far higher than expected, and because of this, we are continuing to struggle with keeping up with the pace of orders. Although we are expected to ship our pending orders within 5 weeks, we will keep our lead times of 5-6 weeks as we are still waiting to restock some items used in our 48×30 machines. Some items we’re likely looking to run out of first include:

• NEMA 23 motor cables and inductive sensor cables
• T12 delrin nuts and T12 ACME locking nuts

These items are currently on order, and are expected to finish production in the next 3 weeks.

Last month we brought on three new packing and assembly staff, and are currently hiring more management team members. This has helped catch up on packing, but we still have around 150 LongMills still in the queue. We are additionally working on bringing in more tooling and equipment for tapping, as we are hitting a new bottleneck in the plate and rail tapping process.

We’ve also been looking at some new places to move into, as our currently 8200 sqft + back shop + outdoor storage is bursting at the seams. At this time, we’re making machines in 1500-unit batches, but for us to keep our sanity, we’ll need to increase our batch sizes. With lead times for specialized items being so long (usually a couple of months to half a year), we need more space to hold more stuff so that we don’t keep running out. Our lease ends in our current building in September, with the option to renew, so we will be making a decision fairly soon.

LaserBeam Production

Our latest batch of aluminum and copper heatsink components have now arrived and are being used in production. We currently have a 4-6 week lead time for lasers, but many may ship out earlier than expected. We are currently assembling and packing lasers at a regular pace.

At this time, we have the parts needed to continue production, but we are expecting our bottleneck to be with our stock of cables and fans. They are currently in transit and are expected to arrive in mid to late March.

If you didn’t hear, we’ve made some tweaks to our heatsink design to improve the assembly. With this new design, it takes us about half the time to put it together while slightly improving the heat dissipation performance!

Hey everyone, here are the production updates for this month.

For all news and updates, please see our Blog.

Just as a reminder, if you’d like to get these updates as a weekly email newsletter, please subscribe here: https://sienci.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=720f140325aaa668a8aa09916&id=e18d59a085

Customs Hold-ups for some US customers

We’ve recently experienced some of our customers having their machine orders held up at US customs. For some orders above the value of $2500USD, UPS is requesting customer tax information for clearance. We are working on eliminating this process, but either UPS or Sienci Labs may reach out to you for the extra info. Some changes to our customs documentation implemented in the last few days should mostly eliminate this issue, and we are working on automating a system to let customers that fall under this specific set of rules (US customers with high-value shipments) about the situation proactively. Currently, this has affected about 10-12 customers in the past few weeks, which is a small percentage of the overall number of issues, but we just want to let everyone know just in case this happens to you.

Please note that this DOES NOT mean you will need to pay duties and taxes, but it does mean that we may be charged warehousing fees if the item sits in storage for too long.

LongMill and Extension Kit Orders

We have raised lead times for LongMill orders as we currently have a large queue. We are consistently shipping out machines on a daily basis, but due to a big increase in sales this month, we are currently at full capacity. By next week, we will have another three new hires to assist with packing and assembly, which should bring down our lead times. Additionally, we are currently working on acquiring additional production space to relocate our rail processing and create additional inventory storage space.

We are also actively working on Batch 8 supply chain. Based on current sales numbers, we expect to start Batch 8 in around May or June. This is quite a lot sooner that expected. Although many of the key components for the LongMill have been ordered, due to the long lead times we face for some of the parts, we expect that there will be longer lead times closer to the transition point in Batch 8.

LaserBeam

Due to a shortage of some components, we have raised lead times for the LaserBeam. However, most customers may have gotten theirs a lot earlier. As our typical fashion, we want to provide conservative lead times. We have partially restocked all of the parts, which means that we are currently working through the assembly for the remaining orders in the queue, and expect to wrap up pending orders by end of next week. For new orders placed now, we’re telling customers that they may need to wait up to 6 weeks potentially, but it’s likely most will ship sooner.

We’ve made some design changes on the heatsink and wiring that we’ve started implementing, which will reduce assembly times so that we can produce these items faster.

Additional parts for the LaserBeam are expected to arrive around the start of March, at which point, we can pre-assemble and keep inventory on hand for Lasers.

Rotary Axis

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about the rotary axis. For more info about it, please see this post here: https://sienci.com/2022/12/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-4th-rotary-axis-on-the-longmill/

The engineering team has continued to work on the rotary axis kit. Here are a couple of updates.

We received a sample rotary axis a couple of weeks ago which we have been using for testing. Due to some imperfections, we have been reconsidering our strategy for the production of the rotary axis. Initially, we were planning on using off-the-shelf components for the whole kit, doing QA testing, and shipping to customers, but as we have continued to do testing and research, we have started to reconsider and look at custom designing and making some or all of the rotary axis from scratch.

There are a few areas that must be improved to reach large-scale production, especially in the quality and tolerances of the components that off-the-shelf rotary kits have shown to be inconsistent. First is the edges of the bottom of the rotary axis, which need to be accurate to allow it to mount and align with the track accurately. Second is the motor mounting plate, which needs to line up with the rotary pulley. And lastly, the overall fit and finish need to be consistent and of good quality. We found that from the sample, these were notable areas that needed improvement.

When we started manufacturing LongMills, we used many off-the-shelf components as they were the most affordable at a small scale. However, as time has gone on, basically all LongMill components are toleranced and custom-made to our specific requirements, even if they are otherwise exactly the same as an off-the-shelf alternative. At scale, quality issues compound, and making custom, higher-quality parts helps mitigate issues and ensure fewer issues with assembly and use.

I share the same sentiment with the development and production of the rotary axis. For it to be a viable product, we need to produce hundreds (and eventually thousands) of kits. To accomplish this, we need to take control of the whole production process.

At this stage, we are currently deciding how we want to progress with the production of the rotary axis. We are doing a cost-benefit analysis and working on design ideas. As far as where we are with things now, for us to bring up quality, we also need to bring up the price. Based on our survey results, it seems like interested customers are able to accommodate some increase in price, given that we can provide more value for their rotary axis. It seems like increasing the price and budget of the project will overall provide more value, as we can dedicate more to the software, hardware, and resources for the rotary axis.

The software team is also currently working on the implementation of 4th-axis support in gSender. Some things in consideration include:

• Visualization of rotary axis code
• Switching between both modes
• Homing and zeroing of the rotary axis
• Firmware and control board changes

The engineering team has currently made tons of progress overall with regard to documentation and processes that will eventually be used with whichever rotary axis we will provide.

At this stage, we do not have exact dates on when the rotary axis will be launched, but we expect the earliest time for it to ship to be in late summer. If you’re interested in the project, I encourage you to stay in the loop on our blog and social media.

Hey everyone and happy new year! As of Jan 3rd, we are back in action at the Sienci HQ.

We have quite a large backlog of orders to ship that have come in during the holidays, which we are working on shipping at full steam.

For all news and updates, please see our Blog.

Just as a reminder, if you’d like to get these updates as a weekly email newsletter, please subscribe here: https://sienci.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=720f140325aaa668a8aa09916&id=e18d59a085

LongMill and Extension Kit Orders

LongMill and Extension Kits are shipping on schedule. There is currently a large queue of orders, so we expect new orders to ship in around 3 weeks. We were expecting to have shorter lead times at the end of December, but due to a high number of orders, we’ve kept our lead times to 3-4 weeks.

We are currently in the process of bringing on 1-2 additional packing and assembly staff as some members are moving into customer support roles. We expect having a few new members on the team will help keep pace with the new sales as well as for future products.

We are expecting our queue to take about 2 weeks to clear and lead times to come down to around 2-3 weeks around the end of January.

LaserBeam Orders

We are currently waiting on a new batch of fans, bodies, and heatsinks for the LaserBeam. These parts are expected to arrive in the next few weeks. Some orders will ship earlier than scheduled with currently available stock, but customers are advised that some orders may take 4-6 weeks to fill based on part availability.

Hey everyone, here are the production updates for Dec 2022.

For all news and updates, please see our Blog.

Just as a reminder, if you’d like to get these updates as a weekly email newsletter, please subscribe here: https://sienci.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=720f140325aaa668a8aa09916&id=e18d59a085

LongMill users on a map!

Using a new feature in our e-commerce sales tracking software, we can now look at all of our customers on a heatmap!

Here are some cool facts:

• We have customers in 59 countries, including Aruba, the Faroe Islands, and Oman!
• The United States represents our largest demographic, followed by Canada. We have customers in all 50 States!
• We estimate that we have about 5000-6000 LongMill users in total!

LongMill and Extension Kit Orders

Last month we slowed down shipping due to a shortage of lead screws and linear guides. I’m happy to say that our new batch was expedited (at no small cost) and we are currently working to get through the current backlog. Although we expect to get through most of the backlog next week, we are currently keeping our 3-4 week lead time for the time being. Once the backlog is cleared orders should ship within 1-2 weeks. We will have an updated lead time once we have gone through initial quality checks today and early next week for the new batch of parts.

Batch 6, which consists of 1500 machines, is officially complete! New orders are now part of Batch 7. For changes and improvements we’ve made through Batch 6, check out the write-up from the last production update. Batch 7 consists of another 1500 LongMills.

Recently we had a few issues with bent lead screws. We’re currently working on testing all of them before shipping to make sure they are straight and don’t cause binding issues. Here we’re using an optical comparator to check how much deviation each screw has.

LaserBeam Orders

Orders for LaserBeams continue to ship as usual with fairly short lead times. Although we have stock, we are currently working on adding another 500 units to inventory. Due to a sudden increase in sales, we are currently low in stock and while some order will ship quickly, customers should expect to wait 4-6 weeks for their orders to ship based on part availability.

End-of-Year Holidays

As we typically do, we are on closing for holidays from Dec 23rd to Jan 2nd. If you have any questions or need anything shipped out, please reach out to us before the 23rd. There may be some of us providing limited holiday support and getting ready for the new year, but the large majority of us will be on holiday.

Hey everyone, here is our Nov 2022 Production Updates.

I’m actually writing this update at the end of October since I’ll be on vacation for the next two weeks, but this should lay out everything we’re working through this month. I’ll be in touch with the team on and off during this time, but figured I’d get this update ready to go.

For all news and updates, please see our Blog.

Just as a reminder, if you’d like to get these updates as a weekly email newsletter, please subscribe here: https://sienci.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=720f140325aaa668a8aa09916&id=e18d59a085

Louis is back

After a 10-month hiatus, Louis, our CEO has returned from vacation.

LongMill MK2 and Extension Kit Orders

Production continues to move smoothly for all LongMill and Extension Kit orders. We paused production for about a week while we restocked on lead screws, but we have received the new batch and will continue to have machines go out the door at our regular pace. We’ve also restocked on a new batch of front and back steel feet, gantries, and rails. Lead times for this month should be around 1-2 weeks for most machines.

Batch 6 is nearly over with just over 100 machines left for this batch. Batch 7 will have essentially no differences since most improvements have been made gradually throughout Batch 6. Some of the improvements include:

• Higher grade washers to prevent bending of the washers used with eccentric nuts
• Custom machined v-wheels to higher tolerances
• Additional QA processes including checking variance and tolerances throughout all of our aluminum extrusions

Additionally, we’ve implemented some process changes in the office such as:

• Kanban for 3D printed parts and some assembled parts
• Torque settable electric screwdrivers for XZ gantry assemblies to ensure all screws are tight before shipping
• Specialized measuring tools for checking fit and tolerances
• Additional foam padding in packaging to reduce denting and scratching
• SOPs on tablets and QA databases
• Version tracking for all variations of parts
• New MRP systems to help keep track of inventory

Our operations team and our staff have generally noted that Batch 6 has been the smoothest batch we’ve had so far with minor issues (except maybe the big one at the start of 2022). We expect Batch 7 to be even better.

Currently, we are looking at seeing ourselves run low in the next few weeks on linear guides and a few small sets of hardware, but are expected to restock in mid-to-late November.

LaserBeam Orders

We are currently stocked on LaserBeams and most orders are going out within a few days. We are also expecting to complete the first batch of roughly 1000 units as well near the end of the year.

Black Friday Sales

As of this time, we do not have any sales planned for Black Friday. We simply believe that providing the same reasonable prices for our products at any time of the year is the best way to run our business. If you’re looking to get into CNCing, we recommend customers order their machines whenever they are ready. We suspect that most customers will find our pricing quite reasonable even when other companies are selling theirs at a discount.

We have never had a discount (with the exception of the Kickstarter campaign) on the LongMill since its release.

At the end of the day, we want people to have confidence that they are getting the best deal on their purchase no matter when they place their order, and we also want to focus more of our time on important stuff like designing machines and growing our community over focusing on selling more stuff.

Just a reminder for everyone to be nice

Something that I am continually grateful for is our active, healthy, and supportive community. We now have nearly 10,000 users across our platforms today from over 30 countries. For all of our amazing community members, thank you for being part of what we are today.

Based on feedback from our support staff and other members of our team, as hobby CNCing becomes more popular and prevalent in our society, expectations and demographics continue to change as well, introducing a wider audience beyond our early group of adopters. Over time, our groups have become more diverse demographically and what people are using their CNC machines for, which is amazing.

It should be noted that although we don’t personally post publically that often, many of us at the company personally stay active on the groups and read most of the posts that you make. I make it a habit to check the forums and Facebook group at least once or twice a day to see how things look in the community and see what’s new, even though it’s rare for me to post or comment in general.

But of course, with every large group, there can be some negativity. We welcome complaints and criticism, whether posted online or directed to us privately, we use these messages to make improvements to what we do on a continual basis. I also hope that customers give us a chance to help them and let us work out the kinks that may arise, as well as open to learning to work with us as we navigate to getting started in a new hobby.

That being said, with recent growth in the community, I have also seen the rate of negative commentary and harassment pointed at us and to the company directly increase as well. I do not accept harassment aimed toward our staff and I have continually been working to help our staff navigate these situations.

In response to this, we’ve worked to create some internal processes and policies to help take care of these matters, as well as post a Customer Support Terms of Service note at the end of our Contact Us page. For our online communities, thank you to our members who’ve stepped up to comment back when people have made negative and untrue comments.

We are people. We have feelings. We love and care about our community and we do our best to make this a fun and accessible ecosystem. Please remember to be nice to us and each other.

End-of-Year Holidays

As we typically do, we are on closing for holidays from Dec 23rd to Jan 2nd. If you have any questions or need anything shipped out, please reach out to us before the 23rd. There may be some of us providing limited holiday support and getting ready for the new year, but the large majority of us will be on holiday.

Hey everyone, here are our Oct 2022 Production Updates.

For all news and updates, please see our Blog.

Just as a reminder, if you’d like to get these updates as a weekly email newsletter, please subscribe here: https://sienci.us13.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=720f140325aaa668a8aa09916&id=e18d59a085

Canadian Thanksgiving is coming up this month. Our offices will be closed Oct 7-10th.

LongMill MK2 and Extension Kit Orders

Production continues to move smoothly for all LongMill and Extension Kit orders. Most machines are shipping out within 1-2 weeks, and oftentimes sooner.

We are expecting to run out of the 1030mm lead screws that are used in various quantities between all sizes of the LongMill around the middle of October.

We have another partial batch expected to arrive at the end of the month, which means that shipping may be paused around this time. We will update our Order Status page with updated information if there is a shipping delay.

We expect lead times for machine orders to be around 1-2 weeks for the next few weeks before we update our lead times when we run out of lead screws.

A small piece of news to share, we have now switched completely to custom manufacturing v-wheels. This means more consistency, quality, and accuracy for the wheels in general, which have been historically a tricky point for us. The quality for the first 30,000 looks to be excellent so far.

LaserBeam Orders

We still have ready-to-go stock on LaserBeams. Most are getting shipped out within a few days.

Ikenna has been doing livestreams for working with the LaserBeam. If you haven’t checked it out yet, make sure visit our Youtube channel!

USD to CAD Exchange Rate

At the time of writing, the exchange rate for USD to CAD is 1 USD = 1.36 CAD. Because our base currency is in Canadian, this means that the exchange rate is heavily in favor of the Americans. That means that while the price for our products is basically the same for Canadians, our neighbors down South can purchase from us at a pretty significant discount.

Based on the reports that I’ve been receiving from RBC (Royal Bank of Canada), their projections are expected to see the USD to CAD conversion continue to be in favor of the USD for some time.

Because our base prices are all in CAD, this means that the margins for each machine decrease as the exchange rate changes in favor of the USD. Thankfully, because most of the material and production costs come in the local area, we are not as impacted as our competitors that have a higher percentage of materials coming from the US and overseas or US competitors selling into Canada. Additionally, much of the purchasing for Batch 7 was done when the exchange rate was around 1 USD = 1.26 CAD, a more favorable rate.

As the continuing economic turmoil continues, it will be interesting to see how us as a business will move forward.

The silver lining to this is that the small discount that our southern neighbors will be getting may stimulate more economic business in Canada.