Shipping to the UK had been broken for a few days. After some debugging, I figured out that our shipping quote provider had stopped accepting decimals in the package dimensions as of 20 December — but only for destinations within the UK. Shipping a 42.0 cm long box abroad was fine, but it had to be 42 cm for the UK.
Also fixed shipping to Northern Ireland, which had been broken for two weeks (an upgrade had overwritten my old fix).
Everything works properly again.
The eShapeoko kits are back in stock (with a lead time of about three weeks). After more than a year, I have decommissioned the reservation form!
MakerSlide should be back in stock in January.
The store is closed for Christmas. You can place orders any time, though, and we’ll resume shipping on 29 or 30 December.
Enjoy the holidays!
We return on the 2nd of January (unexpected change of flight dates).
Well, it’s December and MakerSlide isn’t here yet. The fabricator are telling me their saw had been broken for more than a week back in November, which wrecked their schedule. They can’t even tell me when they might start working on my order. Meanwhile, gleaming new MakerSlide sits on a rack in their warehouse, extruded and anodized but uncut — and our store is empty.
I’m doing two things to work around this: setting up an alternate supplier (long in the works, but these things take time); and re-cutting lengths with defects. I have many pieces of MakerSlide that I rejected because of a single dent or scratch. They can be cut into shorter lengths around the defect — they are otherwise perfectly good. I’m working on cutting MakerSlide for the existing eShapeoko orders, so there may not be a lot left for the store, though. I’ll keep you posted.
One can cut MakerSlide with a chop saw, but it’s hard to get a consistently straight, flat and square cut without spending a lot of money on the saw. I’d rather not do that, but I want an accurate cut with a good finish, so I’m doing it in two steps: I cut it slightly long with a half-decent chop saw, then I face it very precisely with a milling machine I built for this purpose. In true RepRap form, the MakerSlide facing machine is built with MakerSlide. I’ll post some pictures soon — right now I have rail to cut and kits to ship.