Hey everyone, I know we haven’t been putting out a lot of updates recently, the further into production we go the less time we have for writing updates and responding to inquiries. We have had a small number of customers take up a very large amount of production time with update requests, which leads to the big announcement of the day: we are going to go “offline” from Facebook for a little while. We recently had to ban some people from our page for trolling, namely a customer who charged back his order shortly before it was completed (and not very far past the estimated lead time), but he lost the dispute and then tried to sell his slot before the dispute process concluded (banks can draw those out for months). This caused further delays for him, for us, and for the person who wanted to purchase his slot, and now we keep seeing unwarranted posts from him on our page and elsewhere.

Given the volume of update requests, comments, and other types of inquiries, it’s hard for us to balance both communication through Facebook and the manufacturing process. We will still be keeping an eye on Emails (admin@evolutionarms.com) for any order-related inquiries, but we are not able to provide individual updates at this time.  We will be going through our messages today to make sure we have all outstanding order-related inquiries taken care of, but beyond that, we won’t likely be able to respond individually to everyone.

Both the Heroes and the Chosen Ones are in production, naturally the Chosen Ones are further along the process, but they are also a much more challenging. We don’t have a lot of details to share, because while we want to show everyone our progress and we want to show off cool things, past experience has taught us to be cautious about what we do and do not share. Some of the things our customers would most like to see are also things our competitors want to see as well, many times in the past another smith has “magically” come out with suspiciously similar things that they rushed through production before we were finished. Especially with the Heroes, which we are designing and producing in association with Vader’s Vault.  Many of the changes that we made are proprietary, and it’s not just up to Evolution Arms to decide what can and can’t be shared before the product is done and shipping.

We understand that this is going to be a frustrating time for a lot of you, but we can’t keep up with all of update requests and keep manufacturing going at full speed.  For a long time we tried to operate by responding as quickly as possible to anyone who had an outstanding order, but it’s just not reasonable to continue responding that way.  We also understand that a lot of you want a new ETA. We hesitate to provide estimates because the last time we did that (it’s listed on the product page) we went over, and people started treating the estimate as some kind of guarantee. So please understand, the following is an estimate, it is not a guarantee. This is a goal we are setting for ourselves.

We are targeting November First for completion of Hero machining. That means parts should be manufactured by the start of November, but other steps like finishing, weathering, installing, etc, will still need to be done. While Heroes are being machined, we will be doing finishing work on Chosen One parts. That process is very involved and meticulous, so it is unfortunately slow going.

We really hate posting updates with only bad news.  We are working very hard to ensure that the next update we post will make everyone happy.  For the time being, we will not be posting new updates, instead we will be hard at work machining. When we have new and exciting news, we will be back to let you all know. Sales are still halted until we complete the backlog. Given the number of people asking when we will be putting up more items for sale, we have a pretty big financial incentive to get this done. Regardless, we are still committed to quality over speed.

We do apologize once again for all of the delays, and for the reduced communication. We appreciate how patient many of our customers have been, and we know you will all be happy with the sabers you receive.