Barely Rails Assembly -

July 20, 2012

The first three production Barely Rails (a minimalist 15mm baseplate for DSLRs) are born. We're in the process of making assembly fixtures and figuring out the best and swiftest way of assembling all the pieces.  In a lot of ways, this is one of the most challenging steps of bringing a product to market. I always try to design parts with final assembly in mind (it's a terrible feeling to have to assemble thousands of parts that you know could have been better if only you'd designed some arbitrary little aspect of it differently) but first assembly is still an experimental process whereby we get to design and make all sorts of little tools and fixtures to speed things up or improve consistency. For every finished product, there are usualy four or five unseen gadgets or fixtures that go into the making of it, meaning each item in the HONDO store is really a family of Gizmos, for every prima donna there are a few grumpy cousins who aren't pretty enough to be in the spotlight.