Mercury Release

[smiteo]

Hello Everyone,
Chris had to redesign the products to make them smoother which took up a lot of time, plus with Sophie leaving and Me starting, everything's up in the air schedule wise.

Chris WILL deliver the mercury and from there we will look into getting the engineers to help getting the other components together.
Rachel

redesign? again? last we heard from Chris was that he was working hard on batches 3 and 4. is that after the redesign or is it starting over again?

[rodrigue10]

I had given Chris some suggestions a while back to improve the overall smoothness and operation of the R2 design. He has taken these thoughts into consideration and has seen a marked improvement over their operation. I can assure you that any delay is going to benefit not only the remaining Mercury batches, but future R2 mazes that he makes. Chris' hard work on batches 3 and 4 included this modification. I can completely understand the impatience for those who have been expecting their Mercury, but I think you will be pleased with it once you receive it.

---just my 2 cents in the matter.

[LOSTpuzzle]

It's thing like this latest redesign that add to my frustration. I don't mind a delay for a smoother/better puzzle. But why is it 1 year after batch 2 was released are we just now hearing about this?

[Kirk2000]

I would like to thank Chris for all his effort in getting these puzzles to us.. I for one think that they are way underpriced for what you get. If they were produced in the U.S. the cost would be $1000 each. The number of man-hours that goes into producing one of these puzzles is huge. Multiply that by a reasonable hourly machinists wage and, well you get where I am going with this. If Chris wasn't producing them we would have nothing to keep our hobby going. I for one have pre ordered all the series puzzles and I guess at this time I should put them in my will just in case I pass on before they are completed, heaven forbid. Once all the kinks are worked out and the puzzle production hurdles are overcome they will roll off the assembly line like butter and jam off of a hot English muffin. That reminds me, Sonic Games still owes me a few puzzles from over a year ago, time to look into that also.. The long wait continues. KIRK

[smiteo]

my guess is that revoHQ is not making money on the R2s, given the amount of effort involved.
but since they had the fixed Voyager price, they are between a rock and a hard place. R1s cost
a lot more than they did a while back. Just my guess. Not sure how this affects the rate of production,
mind you.

[ReVoMaster]

Dear All

Just to clarify, after sending out the first Mercurys, it was not as smooth as people liked and the feedback using the puzzle was not as good as R1. Also a few managed to get passed certain areas incorrectly.

After talking with Ben, I changed the way the maze sat on the base and made the bb's fixed. Next was a change that added a trust needle bearing under the centre which is sprung loaded to apply constant down force pressure making the maze always at the same height and run exceptionally smoother. The original had the springs in the base pushing the maze up and hence not allow a consistent puzzle.

One other change was that the centre is locked in itself and freeing the drawbar to run smoothly. These changes are being applied to all the outstanding puzzles (not just Mercury).

It has taken much longer to get this right but without the redesign (tweeks), we were not confident that everyone will get the same experience. I have always being trying to make this the best and with the equipment here, has been much harder to do.

I will be looking to get the engineers to make some of the parts that require to be highly accurate to get over future production problems, but still want the maze to be made and the puzzle assembled here.

This project is going to be completed but being much more realistic in the future is why Rachel needs to take steps to keep us on track. She needs to keep in touch and we will be about progress.

We are trying to bring in an income stream to allow more time to do special projects like this. This along with other events recently have made it much more difficult to focus - but Rachel is being more pro-active and in the short time she has been here has been carefully monitoring what has occurred and is putting a schedule to get this back on tract. She is not committing to dates but will be doing all she can to allow me to keep my focus along with everything else that is going on.

We both are working to do the best we can to get this sorted to provide you with the product that you are expecting.

If you still have concerns, you can ask Rachel or myself so we can discus this with you on an individual basis.

Best Regards

Chris

[prodigy]

Big thanks for the updates!

[smiteo]

are there plans to retrofit batches 1 and 2 (at some later date) to get these fixes?

[ReVoMaster]

Hi All

Once we get the remaining Mercury out, Rachel and I will assess the feedback and see what we need to do.

We will then come up with something that we all be happy with. Priority is to get the remaining Mercury out and see that they work as intended.

Hope this helps for now.

Best

Chris

[Rachel K]

**UPDATE**

Hey Guys,

Hope everybody's had an awesome week I have an update on the R2's and I promised to let you know step by step what's going on.

So this week Chris has been working on over drive to start the Mercury's and I can officially say they are starting to take shape. Remember there's been 50 hours work been put into these so it's a slow start but a start never the less

IMG_1627.JPG (560.37 KiB) Viewed 12768 times

Thanks for your patience

Rachel