Hi Everyone, update time – and we do have quite a bit of news to get through..
First off, a quick look at the current delivery schedule for batches 32 and 33 shows we have a bit of a bottleneck occuring due to some issues earlier on sourcing the tsuba and fuchi kashira sets. While the blades are well and truly finished, the difficulty sourcing all the necessary components threw a spanner into the works for timely delivery..
To make matters worse, communication with the forge right now is hampered because my primary contact there and good friend since this whole project began some 7-8 years ago recently ended up in the hospital for an extended stay following heart valve surgery (the poor guy is only in his mid twenties too, though it is a genetic condition – so best it is dealt with when he is young and fit).
Anyway, these two factors combined have slowed down the shipments and made it very hard to determine where everything is up to when customers (understandably) request updates..
As such, please bear with us while we get everything back on track. It will take a while until my contact is out of the hospital, so for a week or two we may be “going blind”. During this time we will only know when a shipment is coming in, and will only know what is in it when we physically open and inspect it.
My apologies for these unexpected delays.
In truth batch 32 is only around 3 weeks behind schedule, and batch 33 is not actually quite yet due. And our two man team of inspection and shipping agents are standing by to spring into action as soon as the first shipments come in, so hopefully the delays will not be too much longer.
But as we have a lot to sort through and cannot provide much information during this period, we hope for your understanding and assure you we are doing our best to minimize the delay as much as humanly possible (I suppose it is not that bad, custom orders of any kind often run behind schedule, and in the sword industry delays of months to years are not at all unheard of, so in the grand scheme of things we are still doing ok. But we feel the pressure acutely and really do push hard to make sure you guys get what you paid for as soon as possible while minimizing mix ups and delays as much as we possibly can)..
Because of these delays, the current batch that is open for orders will be the last one until we have caught up on the backlog and are back on track again with all batches coming in smoothly again.
So please rest assured, we are doing our best and will continue to provide updates as best as we can until things are running smoothly again.
Thanks for your understanding. Will update you all again shortly (phew)…
– Paul Southren
