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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

QK75 and Zoom75 GB are both this month...few smaller projects as well.

I would just stick the R1 (or was it 2) "Any Key" there instead