Hi Ken, Donnie,
First, I would like to start with
"proof of life" of your order - it
IS completed, just needs to get through the backlogged shipping department now:
I hope it will also please you to know that you are receiving our latest design improvements in your build:
We were experiencing problems with inconsistent plating variations, causing thickness variations with the precision tolerances we work with in the construction of our systems. Phasing out the previous steel zinc plated pedal rods, MC pushrods, and brake pedal rod adapters into stainless steel versions has allowed us to improve the precision in these items to whole new level of evolution. It drove us nuts to have to constantly scrap out percentages of our zinc plated steel items if there were problems with parts not wanting to thread together properly, or look good if the plating wasn't proper. Stainless has dramatically raised the costs to produce these parts, but has solved an awful lot of headaches for us while dramatically increasing strength and quality.
The short story is that you will definitely have your order delivered next week and we can leave it at that. Alternately, if you would like to REALLY know what in the hell the production hold ups have been, continue reading.
This is a long read, a candid personal explanation of circumstances on my end, so grab your favorite beverage, grab a seat and fasten your seat belt. First, I burned the bottoms of my feet very badly on Labor Day weekend 2019 in a fluke accident (extremely hot black Rhino Lining type coating on the flooring of a pontoon boat with a slide that we rented for the grand kids to enjoy). I have Diabetes, so the neuropathy in my feet prevented me from feeling just how hot the area was that I was standing on barefooted at the uncovered front of the boat (100 degree day with blazing hot sun). These nasty 3rd degree burns put me in a wheel chair for three months - I'll save you the terrible pictures that I had considered posting. Despite all of the back and forth intensive medical care, a horrible staph infection set in between two of my toes so badly that it had started in on my toe bones, which became very dangerously exposed (Osteomyelitis). MRI imaging revealed that considerable destruction was occurring to my toe bones, and exceptionally scary discussions of the necessity of untold amounts of amputation where going to have to be scheduled. The doctor said that once they started in, they would continue removal of everything that appeared troubled, meaning I could have woken up after surgery to find that they had decided to cut my entire foot off (!) I was completely blown away, so I did a MASSIVE amount of research to find that I needed to force my doctors to prescribe Doxycycline Hyclate (per all of my own research). They had warned me that the infection warranted immediate amputation, but I insisted on seeing what the results would be first with this powerful antibiotic, combined with Amoxicillin Clavulanate. The doctors kept telling me scary cases were the bone infections like this could quickly spread up my leg, leading to vastly larger possible amputation if it got out of hand, possibly even sepsis leading to death. It kept seeming like they wanted to prep me for surgery and start cutting, but I was stubbornly refusing. DAMN GOOD THING THAT I DID, because the infection cleared up within 30 days, with the gaping hole and protruding bone healing completely shut to the amazement of the doctors. I had just started getting out of the wheel chair for a bit at a time in January of 2020, happy to be back on my feet even though it hurt like hell to stand and walk. To this day, I am still having troubles with my feet and ankles if I stay on my feet for longer periods, but I can at least make it up and down the stairs now slowly and carefully and waddle around the shop decently. I am blessed to have some good people working for me to help with all of the big physical work (unloading semi deliveries and such).
So just as soon as I feel that I have dodged the bullet of amputation and am starting to get around almost back to normal at the end of January, here comes COVID in February. We saw a complete shutdown of orders, so I stopped ordering in parts until we could evaluate what things were going to look like. We had to receive the Federal PPP and the EIDL to keep everybody working and cover the large loss of revenue with sales having gone flat with the world gripped in fear of this deadly pandemic starting in. By the beginning of April, I saw that sales were starting to surprisingly pick back up. I would’ve never imagined that, but apparently people were stuck at home and wanted something to tinker with. I then started ordering parts of all kinds again, finding that we couldn’t get much of anything direct from Aeroquip and Bosch due to system wide blackouts in production, but had no problems with the machinists
at this time as they were very low on work with their big accounts shut down, punching our orders out in 30 +/- days. I started dealing with as many sources as I could to do everything possible to get my hands on parts – even Matt's Classic Bowties and other friends in the industry helped me with getting Atech to let loose of the Aeroquip hose ends they were hoarding. Slowly but surely I started to get inventory back into decent stocking levels, but at costs that were almost 60% higher than usual as per having to purchase from sources that knew they had everybody by the balls (bastards).
We then ran into a problems with the show prep units which you may know about (our lead painter no longer with us due to his drug problems):
https://lateral-g.net/forums/showthread.php?t=58620
The net result of firing our lead painter was that I was now having to do all of the special show preparation paint work, essentially having to cover an additional 40 hours of work per week until I could train in a new employee to cover this position. All this time later, 3 employees later, we now have a painter that is doing well enough through his training to relieve me of the insane additional work load I was covering. I still have to rework a few units here and there that didn't turn out quite right, but Rob is getting better and better at it.
Now recently we ran into an even bigger problem where ten grand worth of A/F/X plates all had to go into the scrap bin (made me sick). You can see in the image of the backside of a mounting plate counterbore with an area marked in red. This shows how far off center the rear counterbores were in a large amount of billet plates received:
Our lead times with the machinists has swelled considerably as their large accounts (Whirlpool, John Deere, Parker-Hannafin and such) started to retroactively place double / triple sized catch up orders with them, so I had ordered in large double batches of the various popular billet plates. It took almost four months for them to produce our production order, probably would have been better if I had placed smaller orders spaced apart some. Soooo… we finally received the order of A/F/X system plates (needed for your order), loaded them onto our shelves with a smile, and starting working towards getting after a very substantial amount of back logged A/F/X orders. We get the units built, ready to install the mounting plates onto the brake units, and I’ll be a fried damn ass catfish, we discovered that the plates were machined correctly on the front side, but off by a ¼ inch in the backside, not allowing the brake unit mounting nut to be installed. We went through the entire (loooong awaited) batch to find each and every one was machined improperly, which sucks even worse because we had spent over 30 hours carefully preparing them (deep cleaning, clear coating, then oven baking them all). None of us could believe that the problem wasn’t directly visual at the time we were preparing the plates – we just didn’t see it while handling the plates, never having a problem like this before. I contacted the owner of the machine shop and read him the absolute riot act - they were also very pissed to have to eat over 10k worth of plates straight into the scrap heap.
Next, the machine shop gets shut down due to a Covid outbreak. They had a few people fall ill and test positive, which forced the shut down. The entire shop had to be sterilized, everybody had to be tested and quarantine, those that had Covid managed to get through it. The state is very strict when it comes to reported Covid outbreaks, so the shop had to wait to get the "all clear" from them before they could re-open. So now we have yet another exceptionally problematic delay. The good news is that everybody is ok now. They had to sterilize all incoming and outgoing packages, quarantining them for a minimum or 72 hours before being handled. We were on edge about receiving boxes of parts from them, also spraying everything down upon arrival here along with not touching the boxes for 72 hours. I had considered investing in a UV-C sterilizer, though deemed the antiviral spray down and 72 hour quarantine adequate. Nice, right? Covid knocking on our door seemingly, with them only being a few miles away from us. One of our part time girls also contracted Covid, and I was very paranoid about her coming back to work after getting the all clear, as I am one of those people considered to be "high risk with underlying causes". So far, so good, scheduled to roll my sleeve up within the Group 1C coming up next. I have been so paranoid, as NOBODY around this area wears masks and gloves, zero social distancing - scary to be out in public in a checkout line with people around you that don't care about how you may feel about the situation.
With the machine shop now back in action, they back traced the problem, corrected it in their programming and fixtures, and we just now took delivery of the replacement batch of these A/F/X plates yet another two months later, inspecting each and every one to find them all proper (THANK GOD). This means we have now resumed production on the A/F/X systems.
Yes, I agree with you that lead times on certain models have gone radically off of the deep end. I am working so damn hard to overcome our supplier issues, identifying where the problems are, then placing heavy stock orders with Aeroquip six months in advance to solve that lead time problem, placing orders for brake units 3 months in advance, now also stocking them on a group of new racks set up in the shop specifically dedicated to staying way ahead of the curve on these here in house (in addition to a warehousing company that keeps 60 days of our brake unit needs now in stock for us at all times to buffer availability problems), and have been placing orders in with the machinists 3 months in advance. I now have invested very heavily into keeping stocking levels on all items at levels triple+ what they used to ever be in years gone by, and am finding that I have to move the orders with the specialty machinists up even further still (from the prior 3 months now to 6 months). The amount of money put into fighting the lead time problems is well north of a 100k, and I STILL can’t get production running right due to supply issue problems. It doesn't make me feel any better to know that everybody else I have spoken with in the industry is also having nightmares with supplier issues.
Right when you think lightning just can't keep striking, here is yet another disaster we had to overcome this year. I don't know if anybody else in the industry has caught this yet, but there is a raging problem with deformed stamped steel clevises out there, no matter what brand or supplier we have tried. Check this out:
This of course also led to further production delays, as there was no way we were going to ship systems with any junk like this. I have over 350+ of these junk clevises in stock from all different suppliers, essentially nothing but scrap metal. This is why we have come up with the new custom design super duty forged stainless steel clevises. Even the cross pins and the cotter pins are stainless, so don't accidentally drop one behind the carpet during installation, as a magnet will not work on these items to fish them out. These new SS clevises cost us over 5 times more than the previous stamped steel stock type clevises used to. We had discussed the clevis problem with our friends at Wilwood, and they interestingly said they did not see a market for these - astounding because so many different models of GM vehicles run these. The Wilwood clevises would have been black e-coated aluminum, so I feel that we did best to go with these 80,000 PSI tensile strength 316 alloy overkill SS clevises.
Another production disaster we had to face last year was that Omega / Corteco that used to produce the brass seat inserts we use decided to discontinue them - good grief. So now we have been forced to produce these of our own means also at considerably greater expense. That being said, at least we upgraded them to an improved bronze alloy as opposed to the previous brass:
Maybe it is going to take having to shut down for a month or two to get caught up with all of our orders, though that creates a whole ‘nuther set of issues as we have been filling orders for models that we have had appropriate stock for. Some customers have been getting certain models in 30 days, only because we have had all of the inventory required to build these less popular models.
We are currently taking heavy fire left and right. My guy Jim is having a dickens of a time trying to keep his head straight with irate customers getting completely unhinged with him daily. I suppose the summary is that we
are victims of Covid, causing delays that I would have never believed possible. This has all been compounded by one of the strongest amount of summer sales in our history which was exactly the opposite of what was expected (catching us completely off guard). We had carefully warned everybody at the time of order that lead times have been approximately doubled due to supplier issues, though it turns out that the leads have actually tripled. 90% of our clientele have been very understanding and patient, though 10% of them have been ballistic and unruly.
Now that I have taken the time to document all of this, hopefully those that see this will have a better understanding as to
"what the hell is going on". We are working hard to get a grip on our challenges and overcome them. Talk of Hydratech going out of business on the "other forum" was removed because it was complete BS. Hydratech has been in existence 21 years now, producing the best products we ever have. I refuse to cut quality just to get orders out the door faster. I have always believed that the initial discomfort of delays in receiving an order can eventually be forgiven and forgotten if it is the best quality money can buy. What can never be forgiven is the sting of grabbing something cheap and fast, then having to live with the heartburn of an inferior product from there on out, especially with a brake assist unit being a life line part of a vehicle.
Summary? We can't thank you enough for your support and PATIENCE with us as we work through the challenges. I built this business from the ground up 21 years ago with an awful lot of "blood, sweat, and tears", always ever evolving my designs. Hopefully you see that we really care, and would love nothing more than to reel in our lead times back to pre Covid times (or faster) as soon as we can as my absolute top priority.
Brian Hobaugh SCCA National Tour June 2014
First Hemi 'Cuda Convertible Ever Built
Short clips: Goodguys Pleasanton autocross and pit videos
Sigh...
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