31 May

Supercars, ships and forklift trucks

Hey there, Infento fan!

Want to read about a hyper cool supercar meeting? Or the shipping update? Hold on to your seats, we will take you for a ride through the news. Here’s the lineup:

Shipping milestone and update
The art of driving a forklift truck
Gumball supercars
Nuts and bolts

Shipping update

Yes, this is indeed what you think it is. We loaded the container last week. This forklift truck did not only lift the pallets, but also our spirits. Waving off this batch of kits is a true milestone in the history of Infento.

118 Infento kits packed, labelled and ready for a big boat trip. These are the Junior and Creator kits for the US and Canada, which includes the Junior and Big Snow Add-ons. They are travelling across the Atlantic as we speak. In about 3 weeks, these kits will touch the shore in Norfolk, Virginia. From there the trip continues on the train to our warehouse in Chicago, where they will be distributed to our backers. We also have good news for our backers from Europe. The courier will pick up pallets full of Creator kits tomorrow and will distribute these kits in the coming days.

And what about the Master Creator (MC) kits? We start this week with a little milestone because we began the assembly and production of the MC kits this morning. The plan is to have them ready within 10 days (hot from the wire: 17 hard working folks produced 32 kits today). The European backers should receive their kits quickly thereafter. The American and Canadian backers will have to wait a little longer because their batch will have to cross the ocean first.

We also have good news for all the other beautiful regions in the world, like Singapore and Australia for example. The Junior and Creator kits are already waiting to be shipped. So what are we waiting for? MC kits. Why? Because shipping everything at once to far away places in the world is the most efficient and cost effective way.

Exciting times at Infento. We are almost done with all the Kickstarter orders. We will keep everybody posted in the coming weeks!

Forklift License

In order to be allowed to operate a forklift truck, Dutch regulations demand you have a certificate. So Infento went on a daytrip to get a license. Back to school.

The theory part is easy to summarize: safety, safety, and indeed; safety. The instructors even showed us some of the famous fail videos from YouTube. We got the message: don’t reverse without looking, don’t overload, don’t try selfmade ramps. The best part was playing with a forklift truck, a pallet and a lot of beer crates. We ended the day with a 25 questions exam, and we got 25 out of 25. We mastered this ride, yay!

Gumball 3000

Although this sounds like the name of a giant chewing sweet, it’s nothing alike. Car freaks will know that this is all about wheels. The Gumball 3000 is an annual rally, which crosses several countries (3000 stands for the mileage).

This year the pack of supercars travelled from Dublin to Bucharest. Infento was present at a pitstop in Luxembourg, with a very special ride:

What is so special about this ride? Well, we built an electric go-kart for adults with…….. integrated toilet (say what?!) for our friends at 2theloo. What’s in a name? This company aims to disrupt the public toilet business by making it a very pleasant experience in every way. Though a toilet on your Infento ride is maybe a bit too disruptive and too public :).

Here you see our drivable loo next to a banana yellow Porsche 918 Spider. Quite the pair, isn’t it? Yes dear friends, you can truly build anything from Infento parts.

Nuts and bolts

As you know, an Infento kit consists of… a lot of parts. Wheels, aluminium profiles, bolts, the lot. In total, Infento has 271 different parts. How to get the right parts in the right kit? It took some mind cracking to figure it out, but we don’t let the nuts drive us nuts. The result is a smooth order picking system. But with such a system how do you pick in a fast and handy way? Well, being Infento you just build your own order picking ride. We never imagined that an axle can work great as a handle as well :-).

Get set… Ready… Pack! Below you see a couple of guys from the Infento crew working towards the finish of our box filling line. All the parts are stored in the right order, so we can easily walk along the racks and select the right parts. As you can see the size of the table is adapted to the measurements of the red cardboard box.