Manufacturing - Progress update

I've not posted much recently, and to be perfectly honest, there's not been much happening - i'm at that awkward stage of any project where almost everything is in place, i'm just waiting for things (such as skills mainly) dropping into place to work.

Main progress updates as follows:

Materials - 300 Million isk in buy orders placed for common materials, as well as common loot drops at mission hubs for reprocessing. I've raised requests for corpmates to sell me their minerals at slightly higher than buy order rates (but lower than sell order rates) to help as well.

Skills - About 10 days from Production Efficiency 5. Need to get Refining 5 and then Refinery efficiency, as well as Industry 5. Metallurgy 5 is a lower requirement, but it is needed to carry out ME research on my Prototype Cloaking BPO which is needed to help reduce the costs of any Tech 2 items I may end up getting through invention (before I get Metallurgy 5 I plan to buy from the market if it is cheaper than producing with a 10% waste). All of the science skills that I need plus the encryption methods skills are at level 3 which is where I hope to be for starting invention, eventually these will be worked on as time permits.

Blueprints - Purchased BPO and researched for 4 items - Prototype Cloaks, Ballistic Control Systems, Hammerhead Drones and XL Shield boosters. All but the Cloaks have copies made, and the Cloaks are in copying, it will be 20 days to produce 2 Full-run copies. I intend to buy in BPCs of items that I can make a profit on in the market - first project is to manufacture Hulks - I purchased a 10 run Covetor BPC, with a view to selling 7, and using 3 runs to go into a hulk BPC. The seller of the Hulk BPC has been gradually raising the price of the BPC's though, so after this first batch, I may not bother looking into them again, as the profit margin is disappearing quickly - add to the fact that I lost all of the T2 components required for the first run of the Hulk after the suicide ganking incident, this means that after the first 'break even' run on 3 hulks (presuming I don't get ganked with the next set of 3 run BPC components) I won't have much of an option to make more.

Now presuming that there isnt a giant market crash (or alternatively, someone reads this blog and takes it upon themselves to undercut me now they know my plans) my foray into manufacturing should be coming to fruition sometime around the beginning of October and I'll see how long it takes to sell everything once they're listed on the Market.