Well, here's the email I woke up to this morning:
Here is your weekly update on all things Z.
SCENE I. A cavernous laboratory. In the middle, a brewing Z1. Ominous thunder. Enter three engineers...
We hit a production pothole this week when our QA team noticed blistering in the powder coat finish of a Z undergoing stress-tests. The blistering appeared after extended brewing and could result in the powder coat finish flaking off, so our QA manager immediately stopped Z shipments while engineers investigated the cause.
Fortunately, this component's vendor is just a couple miles down the road from PicoBrew, so the owner and several staff came over to help debug the issue. Long story short: the cause appears to be an incompatibility between the sheet aluminum stock and prep material—since this vendor has been powder coating for years without changes to their process or materials, all signs point to an issue with the aluminum stock.
(We also tested cases from the previous production lot to ensure existing / shipped units do not have this issue. Good news: they passed—which only points further to the base stock material.)
To get back on schedule, our vendor is running a new set of cases to cover our short-term production needs—we are stress-testing that lot and if there is no issue, the vendor will complete a full production run. In the meantime, our production facility continues building Z sub-components and assemblies, so we are ready to go on final assembly once the new cases pass QA.
While the additional delay at this point is both frustrating and embarrassing, powder coat finish flaking off a production unit is a must-fix issue—creative brewing additions like eye of newt and toe of frog may be all the rage in craft beer these days, but powder coating should never be on that list.
SCHEDULE: This delays folks in the January 2019 production set by about a week but does not impact subsequent production runs.
Thank you again for your continued support and patience!
Cheers,
PicoBrew Team
I have been waffling on canceling my Z2 order for a few months now. This latest setback is not pushing me over the edge, as s*** happens, but there's no way I'm seeing my Z2 in March.