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« Last post by Ellipse on Mon, 29 December 2025, 19:38:35 »
Production update:
The factory expects to complete all or almost all B104 before the Chinese New Year (mid-Feb.). Before they leave they will load what they have completed onto a container shipment, so the B104's can start going out to everyone in early April if all goes well.
The inner assembly plates were previously completed for all B104. Just the cases and final assembly are remaining. About 100 B104 keyboards were fully assembled as noted before, and an additional 100+ completed inner assemblies are waiting to be dropped into the cases when the next batch of cases are done. You can see an earlier batch of completed B104 cases in the mini factory tour video in a recent post.
After they return in March, they will start working on the B122 cases. After that, they plan to work on the B62 and BSSK cases; both B62 and BSSK are confirmed ready to proceed and they are making one more B122 pre-production sample to make sure all the tooling is correctly set up and the pieces are properly positioned after assembly. And while they work on the cases, other workers are finishing up all the top and bottom inner assembly plates which need to be laser cut, bent to shape (top inner assemblies only of course, since the bottoms are just flat plates), and plated (bottom) or powdercoated (top).
The other keyboard parts were all completed (modules, PCBs, controllers, keycaps, etc.) so they just need to work on the cases and plates and then finish up assembly. Based on the current rate of progress, they expect to complete the remaining 3 keyboard models in the two months after they return from break. Their main bottlenecks are the laser cutting machines (they can only cut one per machine at one time) and the custom-tooled case bending machine (only one case can be bent at a time); see prior videos to see the Model F laser cutting (similar process) and beam spring case bending.
Now that all of the issues have been worked out (see prior posts for details), they are finally able to concentrate on finishing production and assembly.