Teknik * Handholds

People loved the shapes but were unwilling to purchase resin. So we dove in and made the switch. We were glad to do it and be rid of horrible, horrible resin, but it was a big step in a different direction, and brought with it a massive learning curve. A material that used to allow us an hour to get out of a bucket now took a minute before going je... lly. We wasted a ton of material and realized we needed to drastically change our systems. So we bought a dispensing gun, and invented and built a custom machine and pouring station to go with it- we fiddled with mixers, re-built pumps, customized hoses, made spinning multi-tiered tables, and got in way over our heads. Throughout 2007 we worked with our local urethane supplier to tweak our formula over and over again. But no matter what we did our molds didn't like the new goo one bit; it stuck, it frothed, it was horribly misbehaved. We had heartbreaker after heartbreaker as we lost mold after mold to this urethane's destructive forces. On top of this we were constantly dealing with stuck components and clogs in the pouring system which created off ratio mixes that didn't cure (unbelievably huge messes!). Our shaping of new holds came to a dead halt; we were spending all of our molding time on endless repairs to our existing silicone. Our website essentially became to a grinding stop too. Seth's brother Aaron, who had been doing a fantastic job working with us from day 1, as our all-things-computer-design guy, got an intense job with Vodaphone UK managing all their gaming content, and unfortunately had no more time to spend on Tek fun. Aside from our blog, updating the site ourselves felt to us like hacking the matrix, and fell by the wayside. The combination of all of these things was very bad for business. So early 2008 we looked for a different urethane and found one from a supplier in the US. Shipping drums of the stuff across many states, up across the border, and through a few provinces cut deeply into our margins, but the stuff worked so much better with our ...Read More