 We've got some new wood stuff. We're really thinking hard about bringing a variant of, or maybe even a somewhat replica of the Thai woody, back. We definitely wanted wood in our lineup. I think wood is an important part of who we are and what our product line has been pretty much since the very beginning. I always like the idea of having a wood product line because it has a unique set of challenges to it. There was really two products. There was the glass vap cap and there was the Thai woody. We had this crazy pallet jig system set up and then had to program, you know, step over and make round things out of square things. Wood as a material is just a difficult material to work with because it's inconsistent. Humidity level, temperature, everything in between, you swell and shrink. It's a little bit harder, it's a little bit softer. Then we experimented with, you know, some larger diameter stuff. So we moved on to the vongs and the non-vongs and some other products. And then we kind of put wood to rest for a while. And the main reason we stopped is because they were kind of difficult to make and kind of futsy. And making these little crowns was a rather laborious process. We had a lot of failures and it was slow, tedious and yada yada yada. It just didn't seem like we could raise the price substantially to cover some of the expense in manufacturing. Put it in the back of our minds, how can we pull this off? Kind of come back to our roots, if you will, with some of the wood that, you know, we've been kind of yearning to make again but wanted to do it better than we had. And we were watching how people out in our community were desiring some of the older design wood products. They come in two flavors. They're the folks that like wood, the ones that prefer metal. Jason, we need to make another wood product. And he says to me, yes, we do. It's time to bring back something like the Thai Woody. We needed a way to constrain the critical geometries that we were contending with, you know, so that tip fitment, mouthpiece fitment, all that stuff remained consistent. And see if we can't solve some of the problems that we had with the previous design and not only resolve them but improve upon the overall design and make a product that's just downright awesome. You know, kind of putting all our eggs in one basket in terms of like we're going to do this and we're going to find out how to do it along the way and we're still going to meet a timeline that we were hoping for. Let's start making some blanks that are kind of like the Thai Woody was. And in rather short order, I had a piece of maple cut roughly into Thai Woody shape. Maybe it should be like bigger. And then a provision for a crown on this end. So we'll just have a single crown that lines the inside substantially deeper than where the tip o-rings go so we get a very consistent fit for the tip. That looks weird. It's got a small crown. There's no great way to really blend that geometry. Just decided, no, that's not quite what we're looking for. So we went back to this. We tend to kind of have a saying around here, round is boring. We don't want to have the same thing we used to have. Maybe we could make it thinner. How thin can we make the middle? Because it might be interesting to give it a little bit of a contour. Although it's just round, some nice tapers, some roundish curves, our glass kind of form factor. I got this. And this was concept. Dive down a little bit. Okay, I like it. What if we didn't go right down in the middle? What if we just pushed it a little bit more to one end? Because we wanted to have enough room so that if you wanted to put, say, an omni mouthpiece and condenser assembly in one side, everything would fit. Something that feels nice in the hands, easy to finish, has good balance. We didn't want to just do like the Thai Woody round, completely round. And at that point I was like, I think that we can draw the inside of the crown long enough that we can have the entire area where any o-ring would touch completely lined with metal. It feels like what people expect in a lot of ways. It's like they're used to holding something around, whether it's a cigarette or a pen or a pencil or what have you. It just feels good in the hands. And the picture wasn't really that clear on how we were going to achieve what we were setting out to do, until one happy accident. And then in the process of trying to figure out how to make these crowns, Jason made a neat little jig. Basically just a guide for a die and a punch. And then you could hit the punch with a hammer and it would punch the end out. I just decided, alright, I really hated the way that I was making these in the past. Back in the day, Jason used to take and put the cap blank on the lathe. Cutting them on a mandrel with an end mill on a manual lathe. Didn't want to go there again. The crown on the end basically just went around the outside and just over the lip. And there was no metal on the inside. And then George kind of walked into the shop one day and I'm busy doing something else. And I'm kind of like in the middle of it. And just like, you know, hey, George, check this out as I'm like doing something else and just like hit it, usually punched right through in one go. Well, in the process of doing this, the little jig got put together backwards. And it took three strikes of the hammer before it punched the end out. Just like, okay, that's kind of weird. But again, I'm like trying to do this thing over here and just kind of handed him the part. And he's like, you realize what you just did? You didn't just punch the bottom out. You actually started to turn that piece inside out. I'm kind of folded our cap length inside out. Oh, we might be able to actually make a double sided crown that we can line the inside and wrap that metal around the outside. If you would ask me before trying any of that, I would have said, no, it's not going to work. That metal's already been formed, formed and formed again. It's probably going to be brittle and whatnot. But lo and behold, we were able to kind of start doing that. And this really got the wheels turning. How much further can we take this? How much further can we actually fold this metal back in on itself? Put my cap blank on my modified 2018 M-stem. Literally using drill bits and such and like old M-stems and just trying to just push the envelope. We got to know what's the limit of what we can do. And I mean, he damn near folded the thing completely inside out. See, it's shorter now. I pressed it inside. I've now got my double sided crown. Now that we know we can fold these crowns, how do we cut enough of them? How do we make sure that we aren't doing any of this stuff by hand? So, yeah, just chipping away at all these little problems that we knew we had but were confident we were going to solve and luckily we did. At this point, we were pretty confident that, yep, we've got something here. Like, we knew that we still had a lot of unknowns along the way but we were confident enough that we could figure them out. The Woodwind project was born. You know, we both decided like, all right, the Helix tip was released and we didn't put it on a device. It was the first time that we just kind of released just like a tip like that in mass quantity. We thought, all right, we're going to put it on here. What else do we need? So it needs a mouthpiece. It needs a condenser. How do we put the condenser inside the mouthpiece without using quadrings? I wanted something that was a little bit more like sleek, easier on the lips but still complimented, you know, the geometry of the wood. No orings necessary to hold the condenser to the mouthpiece and by doing that, it also allowed us to create a much nicer contour on the mouthpiece and substantially reduce the diameter at the end so it's just more comfortable in the mouth. It's actually rather pretty easy on that side. One of the last ones is like, what wood do we choose? And so we got some samples, just ran everything that we could get kind of settled on the paduck. You know, it was different. It was kind of orange and it was variable a little bit like a coca-bola where you get like some purple, some reds kind of in it and had a unique grain structure to it and it looked cool. There was so many things with the development of this product that could have just hit the brakes and go like, we can't go any further. Being able to fold that crown inside out, that was a huge one. All of this part gets pressed into the inside of the wood to help hold everything together. They offer strength and rigidity where we need it. The rest of it, I mean, you've got the condenser going down the middle, you know, and fresh air coming in through the airport and diving around and doing a 180. Just this crown alone, I think makes a massive difference in terms of how durable and functional the woodwind is compared to the Thai Woody. It's always important to us that we try to think of every possible thing that could come up that would be disappointing to the customer. And when you're talking about making something out of wood, they could have cracks in it or a worm that burrowed through it and created some weak points or some holes or whatever. We wanted a way to actually test, you know, how strong is this? And so we actually built a rig in order to test that. This is our structural stress analyzer and we're using this to see how much force the woodwind stems can take before they start breaking. And it is specifically designed for crunching things, pulling things, pulling things apart. I think inherently people understand that, like, wood is not the strongest material on the planet. That being said, where that landed in terms of being crush-proof and whatnot, you're not going to go like this and just have it crack in half. It started to yield at 70 pounds of force, but this got up to about 160 before it started looking like this. When you start getting smaller and smaller and thinner and thinner and having a profile that dives down and it just looks like, ugh, the might break. It's not going to break. I think a thousand is the maximum. Shall we? This is the full assembled woodwind. We're, of course, going to have a bit of metal from the mouthpiece and the tip supporting the inside of our part. All right, starting in continuous mode. It'll just keep going until it runs out of force. We had to go through that for ourselves before we would even think about letting out in the wild. What's interesting to me here is my tool has deformed. I hope you can see that. There is a pretty good flat there now. A little deformed, but there's still no visible cracking on the wood. Well, maybe. Yeah, there's a little bit of a hairline fracture going through the airport now, but that's kind of where I would expect it to fail. A thousand pounds of force and you could still use it. You could back over a full unit with your car. You could jump on it. You can do a whole lot of things and there's not much risk of damaging it. Probably don't attempt if you value the things you purchase. A lot of the guys in R&D did an awesome job making sure that we're putting numbers to it and real-world data. Right now we are kind of in the final stages of entering production and going through starting to build units. Really kind of astonishing. These things are so lightweight. The walls are so thin. And making a hundred. And then making a hundred more. And how many are we going to need? The amount of effort that goes into making any one of the woodwinds is far beyond what goes into making a tie-tip or an omni or anything like that. I mean, just the level of detail and the hand-working and the quality control. The number of steps that we have to go through, not just to manufacture, but all of those steps that needed to be designed, developed and refined, plus all of the steps necessary for assembly. We have folks that have very critical eyes and they're looking at this entire thing. They're finishing, they're blending. It's got that handmade quality that you would expect from having something made out of wood. And the fact that it's wood, which means we have somewhat of a higher failure rate. It's not like machining metal. There's always a sense of like apprehension where you're like, I hope, I know, but I hope that we can solve all the problems. It's really fun to be able to make products that just don't even seem like they should work or they should exist. They come from, we don't know what we're going to do for crowns or liner to what we've done in the timeline that we have. I'm exceptionally proud of that. When I look at what it is, the overall functionality, the fit and the finish of all these tiny little precision components that all need to come together just right, we have a very beautiful looking precision instrument with just a little bit of care should last a person a very, very long time.