FHD 2021 Week 49 - 52

I decided not to send extra emails during the holidays given the typical glut of communication everyone receives. But that was a mistake–I won’t skip that many weeks again. Thanks to those that said they missed seeing the updates. I’ll include a bunch of photos to make up for it!

In short, we were super busy–it was the busiest 4 weeks we’ve ever had based on the number of hours worked. Here are the highlights…

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The Hive shop buzzed with activity pretty much non-stop, despite the fact that we were still waiting on suppliers for glass and steel. Now several months late…

Mark and Dan worked through the final production details on all the elements before getting the larger team involved.

Here they are measuring light lens…

…before carefully cutting to final size on the tablesaw:

…and test fitting in the various case tops:

…so they could check every part off the list, one-by-one:

We also received the last shipment of steel, to everyone’s relief. Unfortunately it was quite oily and needed to be washed before welding and powder coat, but the team worked through the stacks cheerfully.

With the metal prepped it was on to welding and shipping the final sets of parts to the powder coater.

Then, with the final sets of parts delivered to the powder coater and the previous batches complete, we set to doing as much assembly in our shop (or outside, given the nice weather!) as possible with Brad, Tim, Ben, Josh, and Christopher all diving in.

We worked hard, but the mood was always upbeat and cheerful. Donuts, and watching people discover the small details we hid inside the products, made the work genuinely fun and rewarding.

lasered Lincoln profile

Of course, it can’t all be rosy. A fire knocked our CNC machine out of commission for nearly a week. Fortunately it was small and didn’t get out of hand. But still. Not cool.

During the repair process we opted to make a few upgrades. Hopefully that will help us recoup some of the expense incurred with the downtime and lengthy required fixes.

Once Isaac got the machine back up and running, it was back to cranking out parts so that the finishing process could be kept moving forward. Jocelyn did an outstanding job managing this process.

And we wrapped up the year getting the rest of the metal parts cranked out, with Brian & Cory’s help.

We even started loading the first delivery truck a few weeks early since the weather was so nice!

All we need now is glass. You know, like the most important piece of large museum showcases. It’s months late. Slightly unnerving… Guess we’ll see how that story turns out in the new year…

Design Highlights

There’s just too much work to share it all, but the design team was hard at work as well.

Graham designed a number of units for the News exhibit. This was one of my favorite units:

Anthony powered through conceptual floorplans for a couple different exhibit installations…

And was able to make 3D models for a couple of the buildings to clearly communicate the design intent and proposed exhibit furniture.

And I decided it was time to simplify the way we brand our Upland products since the engravings we’ve done for the last number of years just take a lot of detail work to finish out. We’ll start incorporating these new steel and enamel inserts into our products in 2022 as we continue to look for ways to streamline and improve everything we do.

2021 was our biggest and best year yet. I can’t wait to share what we do in 2022!