OG, have you looked into doing a group buy for avalon ASIC chips? Buying the ASICminer block erupters is a huge ripoff, but these chips aren't too pricey in a group buy. A user named Steamboat on here has a really nice looking group buy, and also has a company sourced to produce the Klondike 16 open source PCB.
it is only ~ 1.376 BTC for 16 chips for one of the K16 boards. Each board would give 4.5GHash. The cost for the PCB and other necessities is about 100$ each
Link to the group buy is here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/liquid-synergy-designs-inc-asic-mining-hardware-192916He is already on his fourth group buy batch for the chips. I bought some for myself, but seeing as I just bought some seats for your fan-group, I thought you might have interest.
If it's only 1.376 BTC plus assembly expenses for 4.5 Ghps that would be a fair price en quite competative. I think it would be a good cause for the current BTC holdings, and with no need to sacrifice BFL orders. I do share TradeFortress's opinion that BFL won't be delivering "very soon", since they have been "very close" for a couple of weeks already, but they keep running in to (unforseen) problems.
Regardless how soon BFL will start shipping, if we want to stay competitative and keep expanding, using the current funds to buy other ASICs seems to me like the best idea. Because ordering from BFL now would put us in the back of line and even with the most optimistic estimates those orders would be shipped in a couple of months at best.
So any ASIC in that pricerange that can provebly be shipped "very soon" seems like a good bet, wether or not this is is sooner than BFL or not.