Latest post by Chris Barnardo on FB.
Here’s the thing… Once again… we don’t want to announce anything, or set any dates when we can’t be sure of meeting them. I have already published a few dates when we thought production would be underway, only to find more issues that needed sorting have further delayed the project. I am guessing that most fans would rather we made this a great product than gave up the development just to manufacture something that wasn’t ready for production to our standards… the fans that are frustrated by the delays to production would probably be the first to be frustrated by an unfinished product.
What I guess isn’t obvious is that for a small company like ours to develop and manufacture something as complex and costly as the tricorder, we have to be making money some other way, otherwise, we would go out of business. So as we toil away at making the tricorder a reality, please forgive us for making and selling other product lines that, most importantly, are helping to fund the tricorder project.
A project like the tricorder is never really going to make sense on its own, however, desperately fans want to own one… I’m guessing that’s why up until now no one else has done it. I think, honestly, if we had known how hard it would be, how long it would take, and how costly in terms of actual out-of-the-door costs and manpower, we wouldn’t have started the project in the first place. But believe me when I say, now that we have invested that money, time and effort, and now that we are pretty much more than four years into it, there is absolutely no way we are giving up.
As it happens we have a third of our company and half our development team working flat out on the tricorder. We are doing our best to make sure it is the pinnacle of prop replicas (nevertheless I am sure we will still manage to disappoint a few die-hard fans), and there are so many elements that need to knit together, aesthetic, mechanical and functional, that for each stage if we find something that we are not happy with, some other conflicting elements almost need to go back to the drawing board... For the hood for example, when the texture just wasn’t right due to the draft angle, it meant scrapping a very expensive and complex tool and making it and laser texturing it all over again… I know it is frustrating for fans waiting, but I can tell you it is doubly frustrating for us here at The Wand Company, trying to get the thing into production.
Of course, we also know that like us, no fan really wants a sub-par tricorder.
So finally, I don’t really want to make any formal announcements until we are actually home and dry, but I believe we are getting there and production is currently (and I say currently because for the last 18 months, this has been a moving feast) slated to start sometime in late Q2 this year. So, thank you for your support, it is very much appreciated, and I am sure the wait will be worth it (to most fans anyway).
