zslane wrote: ↑kingnestea wrote: ↑
And about the legends, I am not understanding what you mean, are you saying that 7bit's round 6 requires tooling for alphas and modifiers too? Because according to a mail from Melissa to me, SP has standard molds for alphas and modifiers, you just need to choose which font size you want, there are 3 or 4.
7bit's special legends are not for those keys in those colors, no. They are for Blue and "SPH" gray of the "Space Cadet" related kits, as well as various Function key legends in the Honeywell colors. He paid a tidy sum of money to have legend plates made for Round 6.
It could also be argued that the Chinese group buy "copied" Round 5, not Round 6, since they involved the same colors but without any of the unique Space Cadet or Function legends of Round 6.
Indd, this group buy was called R5 add, I said R6 just to make myself clear that this may be produced at the same time together with 7bit's R6 order phase 2 since there are same keys in there.
Beside this, IMO as a automation engineer, it's theoretically possible to plan 2 orders with the same color in the same production slot to increase production efficiency, even with different legends. If you look into the double shot injection process, they firstly make the inner plate (the legends) with a injection process, then put the legend plate in another mold for the second injection process, this second injection process is basically the same process for keycaps with the same profile and same color. The critical path in the whole process is the part of changing supply material and molds, setup of the machine is identically the same, which means merging production of keycaps with the same color and the same profile will increase production efficiency.
check this link out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOpj2Zgk710
