Hello everyone and happy Thanksgiving to all our friends in the US!
We’re back this month from the big tour of our machine shops, injection moulding firms, and metal finishers! We’ve been measuring, scrutinising, fitting, fettling, tweaking, and finalising all the components that go into a Fractal Vise.
The big question, and the one thing I’m sure you’re all very interested to hear… Do we have fully functioning Fractal Vices…?!
YES! We now have fully functioning, within tolerance, interchangeable and expertly finished fractal based componentry. We did find some very minimal issues, but nothing that will significantly slow anything down or affect the Fractal Vises you receive in a few months time.
This means we will be starting to assemble everything throughout December and January, ready for packing, boxing and fulfilment starting in early February. This is a couple of weeks after our original timeline was set to begin, but we’d prefer to make sure everything is spick and span before it gets to you; after all what’s MetMo without perfection?
With the good news out of the way, let’s have a look in some more detail about what we passed, failed, and tweaked on our grand tour, with a surprise appearance from our lead designer, Sean, talking us through one of our CNC machines.
What’s Our Process?
First off, what’s actually involved in a full scale quality assurance project?
Over the years we’ve refined our QA (quality assurance) and QC (quality control) processes many times, and now we’re at a point where everything is beautifully systemised and very effective. The stage we’ll walk you through below is our QC process which is a detailed final product inspection, and as with anything this exciting it begins with an Excel spreadsheet!
This is our standard QC document and as you can see from all the green, everything is awesome… almost 
Along the bottom of the spreadsheet you can see all of our internal part codes and each part code corresponds to a component or assembly, with the one we’re looking at here being the Desktop Ball Mount.
To be able to fill these in we take 20 units from different batches (which ensures an even spread for QC) and go through each one measuring against a checklist of mechanical and visual parameters which either result in a yay or a nay. Using this guy as an example, we had one cosmetic fail and one small note to pass on to the manufacturer. The fail was actually a machining error and would probably go unnoticed if we shipped it, as it was simply a larger than normal chamfer on an internal surface. However, we don’t let even the smallest machining errors go unnoticed and now there will be a 100% QC check on that component before it even leaves the shop. If a small blemish or scratch is noticed, that also triggers additional checks to ensure it doesn’t become a major issue.
From Excel To The Real World
What this process looks like in the real world is a whole load of sticky dots!
The humble sticky dot is the unsung hero of this process, linking the master Excel sheet to each component through a number and colour coding system. This allows any red dots (fails) to be picked up at a later date by the engineers in charge of either fixing the issue or preventing further fails down the line.
This process is exactly the same for every single component and assembly that has been created, and the only change is the checklist gets more detailed if the assembly is something more complex like a full Fractal Vise 82 base.
Without going through every single tab on the Excel sheet, we can happily say that we came home with a LOT of unused red dots.
What Issues Were Found?
It’s always weirdly disappointing when you come home from a QC job and everything was slightly ‘too’ perfect, as you always wonder what you might have missed.
So, get ready for some issues!
1. Fractal Lead screw has hot spots at certain points
This one got us panicking initially as a couple of the Fractal Vise 82’s had a tendency to slightly stick at random points. So, we dove straight into fixing mode as we thought it might be a machining error on the thread or the dowel rods were slightly out of tolerance. Happily, a few back and forths on the lead screw and the ‘issue’ was no more. As with any finely tuned piece of engineering, a small amount of bedding in was required to get everything running perfectly.
2. Silicone jaws surface defects
We spotted a few of the silicone pads that were installed on the silicone jaws had some surface pitting from the moulding process. This wouldn’t affect them in any way when in use, but we made sure to over order on these components to account for this.
3. Anodising on Desktop Workstation affecting fit of Ball Mount
As we hard anodise every aluminium component we make this can sometimes affect the fit in some areas if we’re not careful, and because the fit on the ball mount into the round hole on the bottom of the Desktop Workstation is very tight (which prevents any movement when in use) the anodising has now made that hole a smidge too tight! This just means we have the fun job of testing every single fit and ensuring the ball mount can… well, mount it’s workstation. 
4. Countersunk holes on the Flat Jaws machined 0.1-0.2mm too deep
This one was on us, as the hole depth was not correctly toleranced to ensure the machine screw bottomed out on the jaw and not the dowel which passes underneath it. We’re really glad we found this one as if this wasn’t found the Flat Jaws could have clamped down on a sliding dowel, which would make it no longer a sliding dowel. Luckily this is a very easy fix and we will be supplying precision shim washers with every Flat Jaw assembly to ensure it works perfectly.
If you look carefully at the screw passing through the flat jaw, you can see it perfectly rests on the dowel… oops
There were a few other tiny defects like anodising hook marks being incorrectly placed, which is where the anodising factory attaches the component to the electrode in the wrong place and it sometimes leaves a white mark where the anodising doesn’t correctly take. Then there was the odd scratch here and there, but in the grand scheme of things, everything looked real shiny!
The Speedy Star Of The Show
What we’ve been super excited to see is the upgrades made to the Quick Release assembly, and we were not disappointed!
This guy is silky smooth and rapid to use! It’s also great as a secondary flat jaw clamp if you need to hold a flat thing in a pinch. Every single one we checked was perfect and we couldn’t stop flicking it back and forth as it’s super satisfying to use.
Without going into every single component, I think we should leave it there for the QC feedback and we can jump into something a bit different!
Let’s Get Inside A Machine With Sean
As we inch ever closer to fulfilment, we thought we’d start experimenting with some new fangled ways of communicating our MetMo happenings. So in this installment, we plonked Sean in front of a camera and let him talk about what we’re up to and hopefully help explain a bit about CNC machining along the way. We told him to try keep it simple, but he may have forgot this at some points… so if you have any questions about anything talked about in this video, please do let us know in the comments and Sean will jump in to elaborate!
Christmas Gift Print Out
If you’d like to gift a Fractal for Christmas, we’ve made a handy print out you can pass directly to your intended Fractal recipient. CLICK HERE for a high-res version, or you can save out the image below:
That’s all for now folks, and if you made it down to this sign off I applaud and thank you 
I know it was quite the beasty!