The amazing adventure of building Wheel

As you know, we designed quite a number of unusual and bold concepts into Wheel. We’re proud to see that all these concepts prove to be robust, and work very well. Designing and producing in one shop really has paid off.

But it’s the day-to-day issues that still keep popping up that prevents us from just putting Wheels together and ship them.

Lubrication of the main spindle is one of those issues we thought we nailed. It appears we didn’t. Lubrication isn’t rocket science, I hear you say, there’s nothing a drop of grease can’t fix. We found out it ís rocket science. The microscopic balance between metals and liquids, frictions and tolerances are a very delicate process we’ve only just mastered. We want your Wheel to work perfectly, horizontally, vertically, once a month or non-stop. Flawless lubrication is key to that.

Our plan was to produce Wheel's parts in batches of hundreds, then assemble, then produce a new batch of parts, assemble, etc. During the entire development cycle, our machines have been pushing out high quality parts. Because of that, we’re getting to the point that all parts of all Wheels we intend to deliver in 2020 are just ready, sitting in boxes and shelves, waiting to be assembled. At more than four hundred parts per Wheel, that’s more than half a million parts.

 

In the last update I announced that some of you will receive their Wheel in December. Technically we can still do that, but we decided we won’t. We still think it’s a matter of weeks, but I shouldn’t have said that. From the start, we envisioned Wheel as a next decade product. Not intentionally, but now it really is.

We’ll use next week to reorganise the battlefield our Wheel shop has become, for a fresh start in 2020.

Happy Holidays and we’ll be back soon!

Peter and the Wheel team: Greet, Piet, Jet, Berend, Kasper, Anne, Sjoert, Marian, Don, Henk and Rilana.

Production of stands

Engraving of arms