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EEW Newsletter – May 2023

Electric Eel Wheel Newsletter by Dreaming Robots


Maryland Fiber Festival

On May 6th and 7th I’ll be at the 50th Maryland Fiber Festival!  It will be the first festival in a long time where I’ll have all my products there to sell, and of course we’ll have demos so anyone can try our eSpinners.  I’ll also be showing the final version of the EEW Cone Winder, but won’t have those for sale until later this year.  I’ll be at booth A06 in the Main Exhibition Hall so come and say hi if you plan on attending.

EEW Cone Winder

Many of you backed the Kickstarter for the EEW Cone Winder, but if not I will be selling them on my store right after I finish shipping them to all the Kickstarter backers.  This item was so popular I need two 40 ft shipping containers to get them all here.  While the current plan is to ship by December things have been progressing great and I’m hopeful I’ll be shipping them a little earlier than that.  I will keep everyone updated on the shipping time frame when I’m more sure about it.

This past month I’ve spent most of my time working on logistics for the EEW Cone Winder.  The foot pedal supplier had too many delays so I switched to another factory for those.  I’ve also been correcting a few yield issues with fitting the circuit boards into the case by increasing some of my tolerances.  These are all normal manufacturing issues and I’ve allocated time for these things.  I used to think once I had a prototype I was happy with I could just get it made in a factory, but after doing this many times I now know the prototype is often only half my effort.  That said, the prototype stage is the most variable since it’s hard to know how many prototype versions I need before the design is good enough to ship.  Once I have a prototype that I’m happy with I can generally estimate how long it will take to work through all the issues and get it manufactured.

Here is the final version of the EEW Cone Winder

Ravelry Group Growth

For those who don’t know Ravelry is a social website designed for knitters, spinners, and all fiber lovers.  You have to join (it’s free) to view groups, but I set up an EEW Ravelry group for this community to chat.  I really love how friendly people are there.  Some people discuss issues, others share tips for their EEW, and others share their latest projects.  The reason I’m mentioning it is I just noticed we passed 6,000 members and are in the top 2% of groups on Ravelry.  I looked through a list of all the popular groups on Ravelry and there is only one fiber tool branded group ahead of the EEW.  If we get about 200 more members we’ll pass the Ashford Spinners group and be the biggest group of branded fiber tools on Ravelry.  That’s amazing!

Lazy Kate

I’ve made a video giving an update on the new Lazy Kate I’m making.  I’m quite impressed with all the improvements so go check out that video if you haven’t seen it yet!

Product Updates

Below are estimates and the dates may change.

  • EEW Cone Winder – December 2023

I don’t accept pre-orders in my store, but when I get a batch of products there should be enough for everyone.


– Maurice Ribble
(Inventor of the Electric Eel Wheel)

www.dreamingrobots.com
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2 thoughts on “EEW Newsletter – May 2023

  1. Will you be at the nh fiber festival?

    1. Sorry, I will not be. I only go to a few festivals per year and that one didn’t make the list yet. I spend most of my time on product design and if I go to a bunch of festivals then that would reduce the time I have for new products.

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