Finishing Up Some Projects

Ok. That was a long haul but I have finally finished a bunch of work that was hanging out there and bogging me down with all the minutia and punch list crap that seems to make every project drag on and on. Waiting for final payments sucks too.

Mike Stroh of Metal Planet and I built a beautiful water feature for Core Power Yoga Studio in Minneapolis, MN that shipped out of here a couple of weeks ago and arrived (much to our amazement) intact and unscathed. The installing contractor got it set up and it is running. Whew. This project was one of the most technically challenging projects either of us have had to engineer and design due to the fact that the thing was huge – over 11 feet high – and had to work on four sides. We had to design it to fit around a concrete column in the new space so one side had to be completely removable. Not only did this aspect complicate the project immensely, we had to design this thing to come completely apart, crate it, and ship it across the US. Once it arrived at the destination, some totally unknown dude had to be able to put it together and make it work. Credit Mike for producing the world’s most detailed installation directions. We photographed every stage in the piece’s setup to give the guy lots of visual clues as to what to do. I will get photos on the site soon. We also shot a great video documentary of the thing which I am going to upload to the site.

We are in the process of looking for a sales rep/agent to go out and sell some of our product line stuff as well as the larger projects like the hospitality jobs. We are specifically steering our marketing efforts away from the architect-driven fabrication jobs that we have been working on due to the usual crappy-design issues that accommodate most of these jobs. We are still working on suitable jobs that are challenging and design-savy but in reality, a 2K fab job takes as much project management (read “hand-holding”) as the 20K project so why bother with the headache? However, if there is enough margin in the 2K job to make it viable, we will still consider them I guess.

The office/studio upstairs in the shop that used to be the wood shop made major progress over the last two weeks. Desks, conference table, pool table, dart board, bar (with Coors Light on tap), sound system and a bunch of comfy furniture are finally in place. We are hooking up our DSL, cable TV, and phone/fax lines soon. It will finally be nice to get the office back on line after so long in transition. One F Up a couple of days ago: after getting a new heater up in the space, some fan overload switch went out and the gas burners basically got so hot they melted the thing. Luckily we were up there playing pool and saw the whole thing happen. The place filled with smoke and the furnace vents turned cherry red from the heat. We shut it down immediately but had we not been there I suspect the whole shop would have burned to the ground. Yikes. Now we have to buy a new unit because we think we just fried the old one.

At any rate, we keep moving on…