Flying Fenixes
Things are progressing and our Fenixes are flying out the door!
At this point almost 40 of our Fenixes have flown out the door to their new owners. Quite a few have landed in the USA and Canada while one is in Singapore and another lives in Mumbai. Two have found happy new homes in Germany and another one is currently underway to Hawaii. Our Fenix IV family is spanning the globe.
Whenever one of the new owners makes a Fenix IV video we will add it to our playlist where you will also find videos of our Fenix IV demo and Q&A streams – we plan to do these every two weeks now on Friday 20:00 Amsterdam time. Get in touch if you have any questions!
The final assembly process of all Fenixes:
- Prep the front and attach bottom & top jack board to it. Add rings to jacks.
- Connect all the other boards to the front, hold in place with minimal rings and connect to I/O, routing board and power backpack in case.
- Flash firmware on it, pre-calibrate and put in burn-in for 48 hours.
- Full calibration.
- Put on all the remaining rings and knobs.
- Final complete functional test.
- Apply bamboo sides and final optical inspection.
- Bag, pack, ship.
If all goes well it will take about 12+48 hours for one Fenix to go through all of these steps. They do not go one-by-one so we have Fenixes in various stages floating about the house.
Our house is a bubble of making. Upstairs there are a lot of boxes with Fenixes. The ringing and knobbing happens mostly at our kitchen table. Several people pop in to help out with the many rings and knobs. Thank you, you are great friends! Downstairs is filled with all the electronics waiting to be assembled, a burn-in rack that we try to keep full of Fenixes, two calibration stations and a messy electronic fixing desk.
Unfortunately, now that all the electronics is QC pass and everything we were ready to go full steam onwards there have been issues with the aluminium cases. Our case manufacturer is capable of making the lovely aluminium cases that our Fenixes live in – just not consistently. We have developed these cases together with them and made prototypes that we were happy with. So we move to production. We were set to receive all our cases in 4 batches of 25 (the fourth batch should have been delivered on 30th July). Of the first batch we sent 6 back as they had various issues. In the second batch cases were so warped that when we went to pick them up, we took almost none of them home. The factory suggested a fix to try but we ended up sending 17 ‘fixed’ back anyway. Now we are trying to come up with an adjustment in design as they are not willing to make any more cases that do not meet QC – and we are not willing to accept cases that do not fit our product. There has been a lot of communicating… I do think we will figure this out but we are currently 60 cases behind. This means we can do our assembly only up to the final functional test and we will run out of Fenixes to ship in the next few days. We will continue as far as we can in our assembly process for so that WHEN more lovely fitting cases arrive, we can ship them to you ASAP.
I have reached out up to #140 on our waiting list. Between 0 and here many people have unfortunately replied that they love the synth (thank you!) but do not have the funds to buy it. It has been a long and crazy time to be a musician and a struggle for many. This also means that we will maybe get all the way up to the 205 people currently on the waiting list and should you get on it now, we may get to you too. Send your I WANT A FENIX IV email to priscilla@thisisnotrocketscience.nl
All our Fenixes will hopefully be flying out the door in the next month or so.. cases willing.
Just before we go to the brilliant Superbooth – safety first edition.
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