Crazyduck

While we all have had a fun jab or two at the production schedule of SMI I would like to take a second to point something out.

While I was in Tennessee for my Intro Class with Luke I saw the level of commitment of work and effort that was taken by Shas and her crew to met the Aussie order.

This included being up at ungodly hours, making most meals for the guest and staff onsite and after dinner taking her tea and going back up to the workshop and doing even more.

This was on top of Luke’s training, meeting with clients, potential clients/students (me) and making sure that everyone had signed everything and paid from down under.

This is on top of making all the parts, flashing electronics, marking every part with a part number for tracking, and answering questions from clients, potential clients, the internet and the phone that never stops ringing.

Since the move to Tennessee they have had to rehab facilities to work in, they have had to repair the civil war era home and educumicated the local UPS delivery guy.

As with any rebreather you are going to need spares and extras. So my question is why did you not spring for extra parts and have a small inventory in-stock since you are on the other side of the world? When we sell machinery to Asian clients they receive parts that are the most likely to fail.

While SMI has incredible product I think we need to remember that rebreathers are essentially hand made products that are designed by incredible intelligent individuals that are selling their product to Joe P. Public. I can see SMI in the near future having the opportunity to ramp up and do more of a full product production but how much would that cost them in capital assets and effect their business model? Besides it would do no one any good if they ramped up x thousand of units per year… would it?

Andrew