Hi @stearic

There hasn't been an update directly from John because he has been travelling to the US to check in on the distribution center there. There is an update in the works from John, via Tom and the others but it is waiting on some final revision before it is released into the wild. This will happen when the team get a break from picking and packing kickstarter rings which are still being delivered.

If we consider things rationally for a moment and think back to previous updates we can understand why there may be delays for the backers who remain now - as I believe that a large portion of backers have now had their pledge rewards delivered. We simply don't tend to hear from those who don't encounter problems and this is thus not a good indicator of the actual state of things.

Some things which will affect delivery of the rings and will have resulted in what we're now encountering with the final deliveries are, as follows and has been stated many times before: carbon fiber changes which necessitated changes to orders and went to the back of the queue at the factory, transparent which required different inlays and went to the back of the queue at the factory and finally any QA failure which gets resubmitted to the factory at the back of the queue.

That last part is the one which I believe affects most of the unhappy people.

So if your ring is late, if it is in this last last batch, then it may be because the one which was ordered from the factory failed and the order was resubmitted and went to the back of the queue. It will be manufactured and then sent to the distribution center for QA testing which is I gather a little more discerning when done by the team who will then either pass or fail the ring. And if it fails again, then it's back in the manufacturing queue. If there were less ring types and choices then it would have been easier because an excess of XX amount could have been ordered per type of ring, but with the inlay choices and styles that were available in the kickstarter this is unfortunately not a realistic approach.

In order to maintain a quality product this is unavoidable, and really you'd be a lot unhappier to get something quick and dirty.

On the whole I don't really find any of this to be either ridiculous or an excuse. It's simply attention to detail and pride in a product by the team combined with a rather unfortunate approach to manufacture by the factory.