My last blog was a few months ago in January and I want to share with you where we are at with Liberté since a lot has been happening.
The first and most important thing that was accomplished since the last blog was getting a team together. We are now 6 part time team members and we have been busy with building the prototype for approximately 20-25 hrs per week since early February. On top of that, several new external partnerships have been established with suppliers of components such as composites, metal, safety equipment, welders and other tools and caravan parts.
We have implemented an agile Kanban board and are actively using it to make efficient use of our time in production as well as updates to the design. We are now building version 5 of the design. The first 2 versions with produced by Gibson Product Design, and now we have updated the design ourselves using the help of George, an external team member, and myself in Solidworks, provided their Entrepreneurship program and supported by CAD Micro Solutions.
On the prototype fabrication, we finished the structure of the floor frame. Although the web truss design is complex to build, it is super lightweight at 280 lbs and it is amazingly stiff with a deflection of only 3/ 16" of an inch on a loading of 1,500 lbs. This stiff structure design feature, not present on other caravans, will solve 99% of problems associated with typical leaky roofs due to torsional deflection settlement. We are now creating molds for corner pieces and getting into composite production next week. We are still on target to finish our prototype for early summer.
As a last update, I have settled on a future production location. I purchased a 2 acre parcel of land near Calypso Water Park, in the Innovation Commercial Park and expect to build a production facility as soon as demand is validated.
We are now on Instagram under https://instagram/libertecaravans if you want to follow us and receive pictures on a more frequent basic.