Welcome to another year with MetMo! We have an exciting update this month for you as we’ve had some pretty major deliveries and the main 5 tonne production run is currently being packed up ready for a big ol’ truck destined for MetMo HQ.
We hit a couple of stumbling blocks over the last month which added a few weeks to fulfilment, with one being a QC check that saved the day and the other a small biblical event that was thwarted by the fast actions of our team! We’ll go into this further below, but all is on track now and we’re back to full steam ahead!
Let’s get right to it!
Quality Control To The Rescue
Just before we broke up for the holidays we had an update from the machine shop that a large batch of stainless steel small fractals had just failed a final QC check we put in place and needed to be re-machined 
Thankfully they pulled out all the stops and managed to re-machine and finish all 2000+ in only a few weeks. Absolute heroes!
The Great MetMo Flood
Early last Monday morning we got a frantic phone call from our mechanical engineer Rick, “Guys, there’s been a flood…”
Our off site storage is only 5 minutes away, so we quickly jumped in the car and headed over to find one of our units completely soaked through, with water still pouring from the ceiling. Happily, our team were fast to act and before we’d even got there everything was out of the unit and into damage limitation mode.
Luckily this unit was full of Fractal Vise boxes which are all made of… card. And card is pretty water resistant, right?.. Right?! 
After many hours of sorting we managed to remove all of the outer packaging from the individual boxes and thankfully the thick walls of the shipping packaging took the brunt of the water damage. The next stage was to go through each internal box of boxes (the grey guys surrounding James in the above image) and quarantine every box that had come into contact with any moisture at all. These were then graded as A and B, with A being very light water contact only and B being fully water damaged. All B stock is now on its way to be recycled 
Luckily all of the A stock is now completely dried out with no damage at all. All hail industrial dehumidifiers!
All in all:
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Total boxes saved: 1224
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Total boxes lost: 212
So, at the end of the day, not bad at all really.
We want to give a huge shout out to Anya and Rick for keeping calm, acting fast and ultimately saving the day!
Gold Fractals
Other than the flood all is progressing well with Fractal Fulfilment. For the good stuff, let’s start strong with our shiny happy frogs!
The gold Fractal Vise components are in and we’re now putting them through quality control before we move straight into building up these regal fellas. We’re doing these first as they have the most chance of failing QC and potentially require replating, but the first open box inspection looks incredible, so let’s hope the rest follow suit!
We’ll do a full assembly video of these and should have it ready for next month’s update!
Fractal Parts In Part!
These little guys are the brass soft jaws and we received 6000 of them in early January. As they’re an add-on item they could all be built as a single batch process.
If you’ve made the correct call to add these to your pledge, this is how they’ll turn up.
2000kg of Pure Fractal
In early January we took delivery of the fractal jaws themselves. Made in a gigantic batch, our primary shop delivered these ahead of the main shipment and they slotted straight into our newly rented storage unit.
Off site storage is becoming a vital part of day to day operations at MetMo as we run larger campaigns and release further products lines. Having the ability to upscale and quickly downscale post fulfilment plays a key role in keeping everything running smoothly and efficiently.
Built By Numbers
We all love a good bit of statistics, so instead of going through everything we’ve built in detail here’s a quick snapshot of fully assembled and ready to pack sub-assemblies:
Box O’ Bits (hex keys, screws etc.)
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Black: 3043/3043
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St. Steel: 1588/1588
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Adaptor kit: 447/447
Add-On jaws
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Brass: 1213/1213
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Nylon: 1655/1655
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Silicone: 100/1127
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Parallel: 835/835
We organised delivery of these components well in advance of the main shipment so we can simply pick and pack them when we come to ship the main Fractal Vises.
The First Fractal Flow
Say hello to the very first Fractal Vise being assembled in what is known as an assembly flow line. In basic terms, this is a production system where products move sequentially through a series of specialised workstations to increase production speed and efficiency. Simple stuff!
We have these stations set up for every product we make and the systems behind it are what allow us to keep up with the ever increasing demand on our production team. We could write a whole essay on this topic… but maybe save that for another time.