November

A dispatch from the desk, September 2026. The build journal (start at The Wife Test) has the story so far. This is the one about a date.

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On September 5 I moved the founders-batch ship window from September to November 2026 and emailed everyone holding a reservation. This post is the long version of that email.

The part I cannot make

Everything in a TiltRod is either printed here, bought off a shelf, or a board I order by the hundred. The one exception is the motor. It is an N20 gearmotor with a shaft nobody stocks: 0.8 mm relief, 2.0 mm of plain Ø4.0, then 18.0 mm of M4×0.7 thread. The friction clutch clamps between two nuts on that thread, so the thread length is the design, not a nicety.

Kevin at Shenzhen Hotec built the sample run to that drawing. It was approved on August 15, paid on the 14th, and confirmed on the 17th. The production quote came with three facts I had not planned around:

• The 45-day lead time counts from the day payment clears, not from order confirmation.
• The factory is booked through November. My order is about three hours of their output, so nobody is jumping me ahead of anyone.
• Freight is quoted at order time. There is no number to plan against until the order exists.

Forty-five days from a September payment is late October at the factory, plus freight, plus bench time to verify every motor before it goes into a unit. That is November, honestly stated. So November is the window.

The HT-SOG12C sample: 18 mm of thread, plain land at the root, lead already on. Ten of these exist.

Two things running at once

A second source cannot rescue November. Custom-shaft samples took 20 to 22 days at Hotec, and any new supplier is five or six weeks from first message to a measured sample on my bench. What a second source can do is protect the founders 100 if November slips, and give me a real alternative at the next order. So both are running in parallel: the Hotec order is not waiting on RFQ replies.

The RFQ went out on September 10 with the drawing and the spec-sheet URL. The broadcast version returned a 570 W industrial servo and a worm gearbox, neither of which read the first line. The direct threads did better. One supplier named the unthreaded land unprompted, which no catalogue part has, so that one had actually opened the drawing. Another quoted to the drawing at 60% of the stall torque. A fully threaded shaft with no land is now a bench article only: without the land there is no datum for the inner nut, and setting that nut by hand across hundreds of units against a clutch window this narrow is not a trade I will make.

What is not waiting

• One hundred Rev D control boards shipped from the fab on September 8.
• Shells print in-house. Fasteners, washers, and the XIAO C6 are stock parts.
• The bench unit runs. The remaining mechanical work is a shell revision and a clutch spring fix, both of which get their own posts.

What I am doing with the extra weeks is the work I would otherwise have been doing after shipping. That is the honest upside of a delay, and it is the only one.

If you have a reservation, nothing changed except the month. Reservations still cost nothing and hold the founders price. If you want to know whether it fits your blinds before November, the fit checker reads a photo of your headrail end — up to four angles if you like — and tells you.

The TiltRod, by TiltForge, is a retrofit smart blind motor — repairable, open, Matter-native, and the cord always works. Founders pricing on the first 100 units; first units ship November 2026. Check your headrail at tiltforge.com/fit or follow the build at tiltforge.com/#waitlist.