Picks Arrived!

The box of picks arrived (slightly beaten, but undamaged) on my doorstep on Wednesday night. 

 For those who want to know what 5000 picks looks like... It's hard to tell from the angle of the shot, but the stack is a good 7 inches high.

5000 EpicGrips weigh in at exactly 20lbs. 

The EpicGrip in it's final form!

The EpicGrips look & feel awesome! The thickness is perfect, and the new Titanium sheet is nice and thick, and a lot more consistent than the samples were! You may notice there is some polishing gunk in the necklace hole, so I will have to clean these up a bit, but aside from a little wiping and anodization, these beauties are ready to ship!  My nephews are coming over this weekend to help anodize, and I have family flying in next weekend to ramp up shipping, but I'm planning to put the first batch of picks in the mail before end of day tomorrow.

My current shipping plan is to push out 500 picks a week until finished, which should run pretty much through the month of November. I can't promise a Christmas delivery for everybody, but I'm going to break my butt shooting for it.

I will ship in batches based on the Kickstarter tiers. I will update the blog each time I finish a tier so you will know when to start checking your mailboxes... :)

The shipping order will be as follows: (I'll come back and edit this post as tiers are completed)

• $1 Good Karma
• $1 EpicGrip Guerilla Marketing team
• $8 - 1 EpicGrip
• $18 - 2 EpicGrips
• $27 - 3 EpicGrips
• $36 - 4 EpicGrips
• $9 - 1 EpicGrip
• $20 - 2 EpicGrips
• $30 - 3 EpicGrips
• $40 - 4 EpicGrips
• $100 - 10 EpicGrips

I plan to do some more updates with picks from the anodizing process, but I'm going to call this post done so I can get back to it.  I still want to post a world map with all of the EpicGrips, but it took a couple hours last week to convert the data to GPS coordinates for the map placement.  I still plan to post it on the blog but I'm going to defer that project until after I'm done shipping everything. It's a neat idea, but right now I'm focused on getting your picks shipped out ASAP! (and documenting as much as possible along the way)

I'll end, as I often do, with some shameless plugs for other cool folks on (and off) Kickstarter:

If, like me, you have a unnatural attraction to all things Ti, then you will want to check out

Brad's latest TiPen campaign is totally funded, but there is a reason, he's super dependable, and makes crazy cool stuff.  Love the Splash finish, mostly because I know how hard that is to do... :) Brad helped me optimize my anodization process, so I can't thank him enough for his generous guidance. My new anodization process is much faster now, so you will get your picks faster thanks to him.

Also, Andrea in the UK just launched a KS campaign for some amazingly affordable (compared to similar products on amazon) shiny titanium flasks (...that would look totally cool flame anodized. Just saying...)

John Wrot and his wife let me know that they just re-launched their (greatly improved) fantasy based tower defense based board game The King's Armory. If you are in to such things, check it out. It looks like he's put a lot of thought into the game, and his enthusiasm is infectious, check out the vid.

And last but not least, (Technically not a KS, but...)  Brent Batas has put together a great site called Tabless.net  It's an online tool that let's anyone easily blend tabs and live video from around the web. He let me play with the private beta, and it was super easy to use.  It looks like a great way to start learning some new songs.  There are a lot of songs up already, and the number is growing every day. It would be a nice way to break in your new EpicGrip(s)... The site is in public beta now, so head on over and create a login! :)

cheers & YAAAY!,

-J