Hi, I'm Luke. Today on Out of Darts, it's a big one. I thought I would give you all a tour behind
the scenes here at out of darts -- how we ship packages and get them out, a little bit about
our 3d print farm (where we are currently running 38 3D printers), and just a general look at how
Out of Darts runs and operates. Let's get going(!) So this space may look really familiar to you.
This is our shooting studio. It's a little area we set up just for photography over here. We've got
sort of our space where we shoot all the product photos, where my terrific employee Ashley (who's
running this camera) takes all of our product photography. Obviously, we shoot our videos
here. We occasionally use the area up here for a little bit of other testing, but it mostly becomes
box storage. So let's head downstairs where a lot more is going on. This is basically our receiving
area where I'm standing right now. We've got a big roll-up door that we pretty much only use
for a small little cart. But this is our general shipping area, where we have got virtually every
product that we sell up around 500 plus SKUs now, excluding color variance. Over here, I'm in the
kind of the core of our shipping area where we've got our awesome tape maker. We've got our printer
to actually print all the packages. Jessica one of my amazing team members is here working on getting
the orders out for today. Your orders come in on this computer and then we are trying to get them
out as fast as possible. We are right now shipping seven days a week. On Sunday there's no pickup,
so those technically go out Monday. But when you're running a 3D print farm a big part of
the ordering process, and everything is getting those orders out promptly. And a lot of that
can take an extra day because if you order a part that's a 12-hour print and we don't have it ready,
we've got to take the time to print it and get it back out. So with working seven days a week here,
at least we have sort of a staggered schedule with the whole team, it allows us to get these
packages out a lot quicker. And I'd say probably about 95% of our packages go out the next day
(or at least within 24 hours). So this whole area is like general picking and we've got,
you know, our 3D-printed products, we've got the Li-Po's, a lot of Workers stock. A lot
of shelves are a little bare right now because we are waiting on a lot more worker product to
come back in along with our motors, there's been sort of big delays with the ... But generally,
we'll have just one person shipping at a time, we really don't have a system set up for two. So if
we move down this way we'll take a little detour to the office. You didn't see any of this(!) This
is our little office where we do a lot of the admin work. It's also sort of part break room.
Over here we've got a nice little blaster wall, where we've started to collect some of the most
popular blasters right now, or blasters that we just currently are working on for products,
or modding, or maybe we're just testing a spring. That way when a customer emails us and says,
"you know I have this problem with this product in this blaster," we're able to actually help them
out. We've got one workstation here in the corner, which is where we'll do all the web updates,
a lot of the customer service, and emailing. And then ultimately I end up stuck at this little
desk here, which is in much need of improvement. I have a second desk at home so I do a lot of my
work from there (as far as design work), where I've got a larger monitor, more dedicated space,
and with fewer interruptions. But I end up with all these endless bins,
and the goal is to get rid of all the bins, but each one, you know, holds something that needs to
be done. So this is holster plates that need to be resliced and modified so we can get that listing
up. Hopefully very soon, and a lot of you have been asking. Here's a new Jupiter grip variant
that we're testing -- not a change on the actual product but a change on how we print it. And,
you know, there are other products. These are the 'blaster wraps' that I'm testing to see if I want
to sell them on the shop. [I'd] love to hear your what you think of those in the comments,
but lots of little to-do items here we've got some Proto-Pasta product these are going to Midwest
RepRap fest with Proto-Pasta because we do print some of their filament, and I really love those
colors. This is that 'Proton Purple' that I had to make just for me when I did a filament workshop
and now we've got it on all of the listings (or at least most of the listings). You'll notice a lot
of holes here on the wall. Those are literally blasters that we are in the process of modding,
creating Springs for, or doing something else with. So, let's go take a look at production(!)
So down this hallway is all of our overstock. Our shipping area itself was too small to
fit all of the extended stock and larger stock that we have, so we've got about seven of these
large selves -- we have exactly seven of these shelves, not "about" (as he counts right one,
two, three, four... There's six of these shelves there's exactly six of these -- why
do I think there's seven? There are -- okay, let's do that again. One, two, three, four,
five, six... eight! There's eight shelves. I'm leaving that in there. So eight of these large
shelves that have all of our overstock, and then we get into our 3D printing world. So this is our
3D printing farm. Now production is a big part of this business and a big part of my shop because I
love designing and I love 3D printing. Right now, we're up to 36 Prusa i3 Mk 3S printers and they
have been absolute workhorses. I think the team over at Prusa research has done a phenomenal job
with these printers. We're also really excited to get the Prusa minis in full-force here. I've got
a ton of them on order; we're going to be filling out this whole corner of shelves here, as well as
adding more printers back at my house again, so I can have access to quick prototyping. Right now,
however, we've only got two of the ones that we've ordered so far so those are being put in
their paces, and they've been running really well for three weeks straight or something like that
without any major issues. So right now, I think I probably printed more hours of this printer than
those printers than just about anybody, I expect, since we do run them essentially 24/7. We've got
the print wall on a four-stack here, so you now do have to use a stool to get up to the top shelf,
but it really came down to having enough space to fit everything here, and I wanted to make
sure that we utilize the space that as best we could before going to a larger warehouse,
which I'm sure someday will happen. We tend to stay really organized with the printing as
much as possible because it's a huge component of keeping things going in the shop here. Right now,
we're totally caught up on all production, other than Jupiter hasn't relaunched due to the motor
shortage. So as soon as those are back in stock, we'll have that back up. But essentially the
way it works is up in shipping, we have a system here we're on the laptop using a software called
Notion, they can input the print queue whatever item in whatever color and then it shows up back
here. And that way, whoever's operating the print farm can actually run those prints. Additionally,
whenever we are caught up on prints, like right now, we're printing ahead on orders. So
not everything that's printing right now is for a specific order, some of it's just to build up our
inventory to keep the printers running 24/7-365 -- or very very close to it. So after the prints
come off the printers, they very quickly get brought over to our prep area. This is where a
lot of the labor happens that's in the business. It's a lot of grabbing a part checking it over,
removing any supports, cleaning any parts up, verifying that the quality is there,
and then ultimately hitting it with a heat gun here so that we get any little fuzzy bits or any
little minor imperfections cleared up. Quality control is a big part of running the business,
and we really try to do our best on that. So on these walls, we've got all the different 3D
printed parts that we currently print. We've also got bins of B-grade parts that need to
be still put together for sale. We've got our whole HIR-icane setup. This whole corner here
now is for Jupiter, so these are all of the 16-17 colors we offer for the Jupiter accents,
and down below we've got all of the actual Jupiter main body parts. So this is sort of
our Jupiter station. Moving down here this is is future space that's going to be used for Olympus
as soon as Olympus launches, at which again will come with the motors. The ... has been
a definite factor in slowing up production on a lot of things that we receive both from Worker,
other Chinese vendors, and of course the motors. So we're working with what we got; we kind of have
to keep going on without having the stock, but I do know that you're all waiting for those Fangs,
and Krakens, and Valkyrie -- no, we have Valkyrie -- Michelle: Those are also out of stock. Three
motors out of stock. Pretty bad. We're working on it, hopefully soon. Over here we've got sort of a
work-in-progress station here. This is where we're doing a lot of our spring testing, so we can...
This is a pile of blasters that were that need to get springs, blasters that have springs, and then
other various tools, and things. Right behind me here, I've got a spring cutting station. So,
we're trying to get a little more efficient on how we lay things out so that every station has all
the tools it needs, and every station's got the obvious protection you need to wear when you're
using it. And that way we're being as efficient as possible. Now a big part of 3D printing
is repairing the printers. It's probably the least glamorous part of running the print farm,
but it's easily the most important. We have found ourselves, at times, down five, six,
eight printers when we get really busy. But right now, I've got a guy (Eric) who is on our
team who's been fabulous at not only getting all of these upgraded, but keeping them maintained,
keeping a good cleaning schedule, and even logging what errors we do have. So, this is his domain
right here, where we've got all the stuff he needs at a glance, on-hand, all the time for
repairing the printers to keep them up and running as much as possible. So right now, this is all of
our filament that's unopened, ready to be used. Currently, we print quite a few different brands,
including Prusament Proto-Pasta, Hatchbox Atomic, and Push Plastic. Now we are working really hard
right now, and we're discussing with Proto-Pasta about getting more USA filament in the shop, with
the goal of having 100% USA filament, all of that [will] go away. So it is one of my big goals is to
get towards USA-made filament. And another thing I love about the proto pasta filament, and I'll
cut a shot in here, is that there are spools are made of cardboard. So not only can we reuse them,
because we're literally around the corner from the company, but they are made of cardboard so they
actually do recycle, unlike a lot of the other plastic spools. Back down in this dark little
hole, as my employees have called it, this is our opened filament, which "gets squirrely pretty
fast" (to use Ashley's words). We try to keep it as organized as we could, and it hasn't worked out
as well as we wanted, and one of the problems is that we've got a lot of large prints that
require a full roll -- or a mostly full roll, to print and then we end up lots and lots of little
short ends. So we're working on burning our way through those. We've realized that humidity does
play a big factor in production and the quality of filament, so right now you can see we're at 80
degrees in here. Wow, that's pretty warm, but I guess I'm sitting by the printer here. But
22% relative humidity, so that's really good. We were putting these in dry bins here. Not dry bins,
I should say, but just bins that were relatively sealed. And we realized that the moisture was
completely equalizing inside and outside. So unless you have a completely sealed bin,
you're not doing anything for the humidity inside of it. So all this time for probably two years,
I've been putting stuff in these bins assuming that they were staying drier, and in reality,
the humidity inside these bins and the humidity in the warehouse are identical because they equalized
really well. So in the future, we're gonna build a cabinet right here that will have a dehumidifier
in it. For one it is more humid here, that way we don't have to keep the humidity down in the
whole location because for your own skin it's not as comfortable. One of the great things about 3D
printing and running a shop is that you can design and 3d print your own parts for whatever you need.
Now, I've done this more extensively at home in my home shop, but I'm starting to work my way around
the warehouse and change things here and there. I was really inspired by the book "Two-Second Lean,"
and one simple improvement that we made there is that we spent a lot of time looking for A:
rubbing alcohol to clean the beds, and B: a cloth to wipe the bed down. So,
I designed a custom bracket that fits both the towel and the spray bottle. And then originally
we weren't using spray bottles either, so we were using about five times as much alcohol as needed
to spray down and clean the board. This way when you're working, you can always reach one of these
without having to think about it. Just one more simple thing to kind of make the whole flow of the
shop easier. So that's pretty much production and 3D printing I still love the printing. My favorite
thing to do is to have time to actually design and make new products. I've been working really
hard to get a great team here that can allow me to focus back on design and sourcing parts,
and coming up with new mods, and my last whole week has been dedicated to the Proton Pack,
which we are very very close to launching, so I do expect to have that as soon as... pretty
much when these motors come back in stock. The Proton Pack should be about ready as well in
time for Endwar and more. I'm fortunate enough to have employees that also like organization
and labeling, so we've been able to keep this place fairly well put together because it's
really easy to start losing things, and losing track of products and misplacing things. I hope
you enjoyed this quick tour of our new warehouse, we've been here about a year,
and it seems like ages ago that we moved here, but it also seems like yesterday. Thank you for
all of your support of the shop (!) From my family, and the employees, and my team here,
I love doing this, and I feel really grateful to have this following, and this wonderful hobby.
It's amazing to see where this hobby has come from and how fast it's growing, and I know some
of you have been watching from the very beginning when I had a little one-car garage shop that a
car had to still get inside. And then we moved to Washington and we had a three-car garage and half
of my house stuffed with nerf parts, and now we have this warehouse. And it's been really
tremendous getting to grow this and share it with you all, so we will do more of these videos. I
will make sure I do a tour at least once a year. We are also going to do a livestream pretty soon,
where I will probably do another tour, where people can ask really specific questions like,
"what is that behind you," and I will follow you around the warehouse and tell you what's what.
So thanks again so much for watching. If you like this video do hit the like button on your way down
to the comments, and leave me a comment; love to hear from you. Until next time, I'm out of darts