Hey everyone. I've been trying to keep my head down, focusing on the work instead of answering questions and keeping people posted. Needless to say, yes, there's a
lot of hurdles I've run into that I wasn't expecting. However, I am getting over them one by one, and I am still on track to deliver every kit to every person who has purchased one. I know there are a lot of people who didn't realize they were preordering a product, and are wondering where it is after a few weeks of no shipping notification. If
anybody would like their order cancelled for a refund, I am happy to do that. Please reach out to me directly at
support@thinkmods.store. Please
don't file a chargeback - that just makes things
infinitely more difficult for everyone involved, and it also leaves me with an extra $15 fee. Regarding the website downtime - as some speculated, that was a billing issue again; not funds, but just a frustrating system. My bank insists they've whitelisted Shopify, but clearly something in their system isn't set right, because it always declines Shopify's auto-bill. I'm going to switch it to a different payment method to prevent that from happening in the future. Part of the reason I've been missing is because I've been juggling multiple jobs, doing some AV installation/consulting as a side gig to try and pay the bills, because I was getting to the point where I wasn't able to. The bulk of that work is done though, and I'm putting as much time as I'm sanely able to into ThinkMods. The biggest hurdle is, as mentioned in Discord previously, manufacturing with the LED. I didn't adequately compensate for tolerances, nor did I anticipate the difficulty in consistently hand soldering each LED at the
exact same position on every board without fail. In the future, I am either going with a light-pipe + SMD LED design, or ditching the LED altogether, because it's added months of ridiculous headache.
Another smaller issue was with the heat-set inserts being pressed into the chassis. Despite following the manufacturer's directions, I apparently didn't carve out enough of a gap in their mounting holes, so when being pressed into the chassis, they were pushing molten ABS up into the PCB area, which meant the PCB didn't mount flush. I've alleviated this with a jig that stops the plastic from flowing in that direction, but this whole topic also caused far more headache than anticipated. This was supposed to be a simple product. I want it done just as much as you. I don't want to feel burnt out on the field of work I most enjoy. Doing everything by hand is exhausting. Now that I know what the problem areas are, I'm sure I can fix them for a V2, but I still need to ship V1, so I've just been trudging through it. I'm very sorry for the lack of updates - the constant communication of "shipping is right around the corner this time!" has been driving
me insane, too. So, with all of that shared, if you are OK with not having an LED,
please send me an email with your order # and the fact that you don't want the LED, and
I will ship your order ASAP. I can ship non-LED orders out infinitely more quickly. I'll include the unsoldered LED in the bag, and you can solder it later, if you'd like.
