Hi everybody,
We hope that you’re all doing well and that it’s not getting too cold in your area ;)
Time for some news on our end and they are looking more and more promising.
In the past few weeks, we’ve done countless tests on the tubes that we had produced beginning of October. As we had told you, we had already seen major improvements since this summer’s production but were still facing some hermeticity issues on some of the tubes. The good news is that we believe we have isolated them and have identified the root cause. They were coming mainly from a deformation on the cover after weeks under pressure. We have fixed this issue by increasing the rigidity of the cover which is now not giving any signs of moving (that’s good). For you to better understand, on the left hand side we’ve got the cover with more rigidity and on the right, the former one. As you can see, the gap between the cover and the body of the tube is much larger on the right hand side which was ultimately causing pressure loss.
After fixing this issue, we found another small issue linked to the closing of the tube. This is because by increasing the rigidity of the cover, the friction force was too high and it became too tough to close the tube. This is also fixed now.
Of course, we continue monitoring the situation by testing more and more tubes but we truly believe that we’re close to the end of this long journey.
As you can imagine, things took/take a long time because we have to work in iterations that work as follows:
- Identify the issue
- Find a solution
- Test the solution by 3D printing it
- If the solution works, start modifying the mold
- Inject a few pieces to validate the fix
So what’s next? We’ll be producing a new batch in the coming days of about a hundred tubes. These will all be thoroughly tested (in 3 steps). Once they pass our tests, we’ll start shipping those.
The production of larger volumes will start as soon as everything is tested and validated, we hope this will be at the very start of the year. We will of course keep you posted.
We know that some of you had planned on offering the tube as a gift for Christmas and we will unfortunately not be able to make that happen. We have nevertheless prepared a Christmas digital gift card that we would be happy to send you to put under the tree.
We wish you the best end of year celebrations and we can’t wait to start 2024 with a bang or rather a good nice “psssht” 😍
Have a nice one,
Antoine, Maxime & Greg