[IC] GMK Moon Rabbit - Inspired by my favorite childhood candySubmitted by tomm_kb t3_zz4chr in MechanicalKeyboards
bsiu t1_j29zeq9 wrote
Love the colorway, would probably impulse buy it if it was an in-stock item. I use mainly GMK for all my boards but with that said, there's no way in hell I'm putting in money for a GB that will potentially take 3 years at current pace. Would rather pay the $30-50 inflation/pre-order/in-stock price hike than join a GMK GB at the moment. Best of luck in the IC/GB and hope it goes through. GMK, get your shit together.
ivrji t1_j2acse1 wrote
same, this is an amazing set but gmk wait times are absolutely rotten
TightElderberry t1_j2aka2i wrote
I would also wait until actual color samples are out. Have seen too many sets be so poorly color matched that I'm not willing to shell out money up front for a product sight unseen.
bsiu t1_j2auvsv wrote
Unfortunately, the norm is go to GB stage with renders and pantone/ral chips and do the matching after funds are secured. It can go well or really poorly, I encourage anyone to look into hanami dango if you want an example of this.
Jacobn12x t1_j2ajt7k wrote
GMK has SIGNIFICANTLY increased their production capacity. GMK Andy said that every set in the queue will finish in September of 2023 and even the "GMK Queue and Estimated Shipping Date" sheet has the last set finishing in Q1 2024. So taking the average of those two sources, it's pretty feasible for this set to ship in a year at most. Sure it's not ideal when we see in-stock sets popping up like crazy, but to not acknowledge that it's improved is just wrong.
bsiu t1_j2atlbd wrote
If you look at the trailing monthly average for the past year+ and remove outliers, you're still looking at 5-8 sets a month, seeing as they have had almost a year to train people on the new machines, 8-9 community sets seems to be their current max capacity going forward. This does not necessarily take into account non community orders that need to be run but not on the sheet, though Drop seems to be moving away from any new GMK orders now since they have DCX.
Even if they can keep the estimate of Q4 2023 for all in queue sets, any current IC will still be several months away from GB date. Then we have to hope for a good result in color matching as cannonkeys has already confirmed it take upwards of 6 months to get a sample back, or possibly years in the worst case scenario where multiple rounds are needed. (One of the worst cases, Red Dragon just finished their color matching and order confirmation a few months ago and the GB ended in Nov 2020.)
Andy himself has said they do no consider a set as ordered till is passes all these other checks of MOQ/Payment/Matching/etc. so any number they give is from order date confirmation, which seems to be 10 months at best.
Even when a set is "completed" it takes 3-6 months for some US/CA vendors to land their shipment. There are multiple "completed" sets that you can DHL over in 3 days from the German vendor or wait half a year for the US one to deal with logistics. It was worse in the past years and is improving but this just shows how much the current world events effect this stuff.
China just opened the flood gates to covid, who knows if ANY part of their supply chain would be affected by it, most likely yes seeing as how globalized everything is now.
Anyone giving a one year timeline on GMK is optimistic at best and ignorant at worst, there are just too many factors to predict. Even hitting a single snag in the chain will drive delivery a quarter to half a year out.
TL:DR it's not entirely GMKs fault as there are various steps before GMK even gets the green light but
Edit: also I'm not sure "SIGNIFICANTLY improved" (from when they got their machines 10 months ago) to now is 6 sets in Feb 2021 to 7 sets in Dec 2022 is the right choice of word here. The average is better now, they get a star for that but I personally believe I won't see any current IC/GB GMK set at a (US/CA) doorstep for 2 years at the very least. It might not be entirely GMKs fault because of the number of parties involved and it's also an issue with KAT/SP sets. As much as a love ABS, I've recently been buying more PBT in-stock sets from the likes of novelkeys /drop dcx because well, they are actually fronting the money and having sets out in the timeframe of months.
Jacobn12x t1_j2b11y4 wrote
I'll reply to each of your points individually:
> 8-9 community sets seems to be their current max capacity going forward.
It's not as simple as "insert amount of sets" per month. The sets GMK are going through right now are very large in the number of kits. As we get down to the smaller sets in the queue (there are a ton of sets in the queue right now that don't even have 1000 base kit orders), they will be able to go through many more sets than a month with larger sets (ie Metropolis, Striker R2)
> Even if they can keep the estimate of Q4 2023 for all in queue sets, any current IC will still be several months away from GB date.
A set doesn't "have" to take months to go into GB. It's completely reliant on if the designer has vendors lined up already and has worked with those vendors to get quotes beforehand.
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> Then we have to hope for a good result in color matching as cannonkeys has already confirmed it take upwards of 6 months to get a sample back, or possibly years in the worst case scenario where multiple rounds are needed.
>
> Andy himself has said they do no consider a set as ordered till is passes all these other checks of MOQ/Payment/Matching/etc. so any number they give is from order date confirmation, which seems to be 10 months at best.
GMK Mizu completed GB in June of 2019, Went through 3 rounds of color matching, and the first person to receive theirs from a vendor on the geekhack page was in December of 2019. I don't want to put blame on anybody, but 6 months for one sample round is most certainly an anomaly, considering that a lot of vendor's update pages like Omnitype's show samples being made in less than 2 months. All of this to say: As we get through all of the sets in the queue, lead times on everything from samples, sorting, and shipment will shorten since they have a lot less on their plate to keep up with as visible from GMK Mizu's GB and many other GMK GBs from that time before there were dozens of sets in the production queue.
​
> Even when a set is "completed" it takes 3-6 months for some US/CA vendors to land their shipment. There are multiple "completed" sets that you can DHL over in 3 days from the german vendor or wait half a year for the US one to deal with logistics. It was worse in the past yearw and is improving but this just shows how much the current world events effect this stuff.
>
> China just opened the flood gates to covid, who knows if ANY part of their supply chain would be affected by it, most likely yes seeing as how globalized everything is now.
COVID has been the only major world event that has caused a slow-up in GMK's manufacturing, so I do not see how else it would get worse over time. Also AFAIK, none of GMK's manufacturing relies on China.
​
> Anyone giving a one year timeline on GMK is optimistic at best and ignorant at worst, there are just too many factors to predict. Even hitting a single snag in the chain will drive delivery a quarter to half a year out.
So you are so well versed in GMK's manufacturing line that you know exactly how long a "snag" takes to sort out? And what do these snags look like?
bsiu t1_j2b67j5 wrote
> It's not as simple as "insert amount of sets" per month.
You're right but we can only base estimates off information we have and historically this is what they have been averaging. I'm not going to delve into MOQ comparisons for 150+ sets and figure out which ones will be completed faster, nor do I have information about production numbers for anything not on that sheet. Another factor to consider is that when moving to smaller MOQ sets, this requires more downtime to rotate molds, plastics, clean machines, dial in settings, etc. and leads to lower output. This is something Andy has already detailed on. Moving to smaller sets does not mean faster production.
>I don't want to put blame on anybody, but 6 months for one sample round is most certainly an anomaly
Like I said, upwards. While I don't know this specific designers' history with working with vendors/GMK, I was referencing community sets in general. Depending on the designer this stage could potentially take a very long time. The case with Rensuya is definitely an outlier, they seem to have a very specific vision for the sets and will take as many color matching samples as it takes to reach it.
>Also AFAIK, none of GMK's manufacturing relies on China.
I don't know where GMK sources their raw material from, the majority of the worlds ABS resin is produced in Asia (S. Korea/Taiwan are big ones). If they do use any of these supply chains, there could be slow downs. They have said they secured a large raw materials allocation that is good for several sets but warehouse space costs money and I highly doubt they hold years worth of orders in raw material. If there's anything we learned from covid, everything relies on everything, direct or not china is likely involved.
>So you are so well versed in GMK's manufacturing line that you know exactly how long a "snag" takes to sort out? And what do these snags look like?
I never claimed to know anything about GMK manu other than publicly stated information. I also said "chain" which means everything from designers having personal problems or running out of material to shipping times increasing again if half of china decides to catch covid and halt all it's ports.
Jacobn12x t1_j2b8uda wrote
> This is something Andy has already detailed on. Moving to smaller sets does not mean faster production.
Maybe so, but when we are talking about sets with thousands of kits being made compared to hundreds there will of course be some sort of difference. This is why GMK Dots took so long, while other sets were seemingly shooting out of the pipeline. The time to sort these sets and package them is also a concern, which adds time to a larger set comparatively.
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> Like I said, upwards. While I don't know this specific designers' history with working with vendors/GMK, I was referencing community sets in general. Depending on the designer this stage could potentially take a very long time.
If designers properly match their renders to their chosen color reference, there is zero excuse why the colors should take more than one round of color matching unless the color is very bright, pale, or a shade of grey, black, or white. GMK uses proper equipment to color match according to the reference you are sending, so most color-matching rounds that are rejected are the designer's fault. GMK Dracula's colors were referenced using digital hex codes, which explains why it took an absurd amount of time to get it right.
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> You're right but we can only base estimates off information we have
You can't say this and then further down in your comment say that shipping or designer's personal situations will somehow, someway go wrong.
bsiu t1_j2b97ci wrote
> You can't say this and then further down in your comment say that shipping or designer's personal situations will somehow, someway go wrong.
Except this is exactly what happend with a few sets.
Jacobn12x t1_j2b9jts wrote
Sure, maybe a few sets like GMK Minimal got left out in the rain and got ruined. Now tell me how that's GMK's fault and not the shipping courier's.
bsiu t1_j2baanh wrote
While my initial comment had a jest at GMK, I never blamed the entirety of "time to delivery" on GMK. Every part of the chain is a factor and many part of it out of control of GMK.
ZulkarnaenRafif t1_j2c59ic wrote
wat wrong with buy clone m8? gmk expensive :( need fortnite skins
why plastic expensive? their german?
>!This IC post gonna pop like corns in an oven. I guarantee you that. Sadly, I am not sure either because the good design or the GMK bad nano-drama again.!<
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