Fränk moves to injection moulding

The Fränk crowdfunding campaign has officially come to an end, and we couldn’t be more grateful to everyone who backed the project.

In total, 126 backers from around the world contributed €116,560 to bring Fränk to life. This is considerably more than we initially expected and showed us that there is more demand for a machine like Fränk than we had anticipated.

A huge thank you to everyone who believed in the project and helped make it possible.

Moving to Injection Moulding

We took some time after the campaign to carefully review how we are going to manufacture Fränk and how the different production options would affect the project timeline.

To put the scale into perspective, we need to produce 112 Fränk machines for our backers, plus roughly the same number for our resellers and our own store. Initially, we planned to 3D-print most of the plastic components, but at these quantities, production and assembly would become more difficult than we are comfortable with.

For this reason, we have decided to take a different route and move to injection-moulded plastic parts for Fränk.

There is one downside: this will move our estimated delivery from Q1 2027 to around Q2 2027. Injection moulding requires the plastic parts to be redesigned specifically for this manufacturing process, so there is quite a bit of engineering work ahead of us before tooling can begin.

However, we believe the extra work and time will be worth it. Injection moulding will give us much better consistency between parts, better surface quality, and a cleaner overall appearance than we could achieve with 3D printing.

Ultimately, we want the Fränk you receive to be a machine that feels finished, reliable, and built to last, not something that feels like a prototype rushed into production.

Fränkie, our daylight developing tank, will take a slightly different path. During the campaign, we said that Fränkie would be injection moulded if we passed the €100,000 mark. While the campaign did pass that milestone, the number of Fränkie orders was much lower than the number of Fränk orders, so injection moulding it no longer makes sense.

Instead, Fränkie will be 3D printed. Fortunately, it is a much simpler product than Fränk, with considerably fewer components, so 3D printing is well suited to the quantities we need to produce.

Thank You to the Community

I also want to personally thank everyone in the community who has supported the project, shared their ideas, and especially those who have spent time testing our prototype units.

Thanks to your feedback, we now have a much better understanding of what it takes to make a good Super 8 and 16 mm film processor. Of course, we can't build a machine that suits every possible workflow, but your feedback has given us many ideas for how to get the most out of Fränk and make it as useful as possible for different ways of working with film.

Many of the changes we are making now are a direct result of that feedback, so thank you for being part of the development process.

What’s Next

Our immediate focus is now on redesigning the plastic components for injection moulding while continuing to test and improve the parts of Fränk that we already know work well.

Once the new design is ready, we can move on to tooling and the first injection-moulded samples. Those samples will then need to be assembled and tested before we can approve the parts for production.

There is still plenty of work ahead, and we will keep sharing the process.

Thank you again for making Fränk possible. Now it’s time for us to build it.

Timeline

• October 2026The reel goes into injection moulding
• November 2026Fränk's plastic parts go into injection moulding
• February 2027First injection-moulded reels in hand
• March 2027Fränkie ships
• March 2027Injection-moulded Fränk parts in hand
• May–June 2027Fränk ships