Titanium Updates And A Random Personal Project
A few things today...
First up, we are back up and running here at the workshop.
The lockdown here in New Zealand lasted for 5 weeks in total and the country is slowly coming out of it.
Luckily, since we are not customer-facing, we can now get stuck back into production (many businesses are still closed).
We had some products that were late before this lockdown. And now, of course, 5 weeks on and they are even more late. But, like I said, we're ramping up production again as I type this (actually, we started a few days ago).
First products I'll cover are the TiVault™ Secure Titanium Cache, Bolty™ Titanium Pen and Titanium PillPots™...
Round Titanium Parts
The TiVault™, Bolty™ and PillPots™ are all round parts.
After many years of having my machinist make these parts at his workshop we're able to bring these in-house (like the other CNC machining work we do).
We just took delivery of a new CNC lathe on Friday (which has something we've been working on for many months).
In the next few days we should have it up and running and starting to make the first parts.
Here are a couple of photos of getting the machine in and putting it in place:
The PillPots™, TiVault™ and Bolty™ will mostly be made on this machine.
However, there are some parts of each of these that will be done on the milling machine (i.e. the "key" for the TiVault™, the pocket-clip for the Bolty™, etc.).
Will update again soon on this once we get it up-and-running and making parts!
Knives
The two knives (Magnatron™ / Fliptility™ and Project ZERO™) we're working on will be back up and running with starting tomorrow.
I'll give an update on these at the start of next week once we are closer to getting the first parts off the CNC.
Other Projects
Although we couldn't run production during lockdown ...we still ran a couple of crowdfunding projects.
One was for a new "V2" version of the TiWallet™ on IndieGoGo:
We also launched a Kickstarter project for a new Utility Blade Knife I called the SlideClick™:
The project did amazingly well and shipping is in July. If you missed this project then you can still pre-order here: Titanium SlideClick™ Utility Blade Knife
A Non-Titanium Project (...or "How To Get Stuff Done!")
I'd like to share a personal project with you.
It has nothing to do with titanium or anything like that (so feel free to skip this!).
It's not something I'm working on right now (catching up with late projects is the priority right now) ...but this is something I had made last year.
Basically, it's a journal/notebook that helps you get stuff done. Actually, it doesn't really help you ...it kind of forces you. And, honestly, it is the best thing I've used.
I've seen and tried different journals in the past - but I just could never get them to work for me. Some are to get you "organized" (I don't want to be organized ...I just want to get the stuff done that needs to be done!).
The layout of it is fairly simple and has developed over time (it's not something I sat down and came up with ...it's evolved over a few years). Over the years I've tried various things. Some worked. Some didn't work. This journal is a combination of things I found that actually worked.
Here's an example of a couple of the pages (there are a few different ones that together make up the journal as a whole):

Now, I'm going to be totally honest here...
I don't use it all the time. Why? Because I am an idiot.
When I start using it I end up getting a few days worth of work done in about half a day and think, "Man, I can't believe I don't use this every day!!".
I then use the journal for a few days in a row (sometimes up to a couple of weeks in a row) ...and then I get overconfident and feel like I'm this getting-stuff-done-machine ...and that I don't need the journal any more.
And then, a few weeks later, I'll find myself struggling to get past procrastination and generally being hugely inefficient yet again. And I will again find I'm putting off the "grind work" that I know NEEDS to be done.
I then start using the journal and the whole cycle starts over again.
So, yeah, I'm a totally imperfect human for sure. If I can continue to keep training myself to use what I call the "Grind Journal", then amazing progress is made every day. It already works incredibly well ...I just need to do more of it. 🙂
Here's the design I made for the outside cover (excuse the slightly beat-up nature of it ...I've been using it a lot :-D)

I thought I'd share this with you in case it's something you struggle with as well.
Do you struggle with this stuff?
If there is enough interest I can probably get more made (I crudely printed one myself ...and then had three made as sort of prototypes based on that one).
They would maybe sell in packs of 3 or 5 or 10 or something like that as the minimum amount is something like 300 of 500 or such (because I only printed three initially ...they were $60 EACH!!). Need to do more numbers to bring that down.
If you're interested I can make a separate blog post and explain how it works (it's really brain-dead simple and nothing "fancy" ...but it's the only thing like this I've used that actually works!).
Just to be clear...
My personal biggest issue is just getting the "grind work" done every day.
This "Grind Journal" does not
organize my life. No lists. Not prioritizing of stuff. No "bullets". None of that stuff has ever worked for me.
It does ONLY TWO THINGS and that's it. What it does is it...
#1 - Forces you to do the work you know needs to be done ...or, in other words, the grind!
#2 - Get immediate feedback on any inefficiencies at getting stuff done ...and eliminate them right away (I routinely learn of an inefficiency one day ...and implement a change the next day so it does not happen again)