In regards to your last paragraph doc. It seems to me in my financial dealings with the general public that they are only willing to pay for a quality product when they can beat you down to “Dollar Store” prices. What ever happened to “I’m willing to pay what I know it is worth.” ??
Ummm, you pose an interesting question.
As an example, let’s take a car maker: Mercedes Benz. In the '50s, '60s and '70s, they built machines of high quality, though not for the general public, rather they were built for people who viewed one of their cars as a long term item ( I won’t say ‘investment’ ) to be used, maintained and repaired for a long time by somebody who knew the difference between one of theirs and, say, the Chevys or the Fiats of the day.
It may be apocryphal, but it was said that the 280SL, a relatively small convertible, had on it 20 kilos of paint straight from the factory. Built to hold up. The engines may not have been the most powerful but they were reliable and when Benz built the car they built a wild amount of spares for it, likely there’s still some for the 280SL in the warehouses fifty years on. And, while a Rolls Royce might have been built to theoretically go ‘forever’ for a very serious price, the Benzes were built to be rebuilt forever by a good mechanic who would need those spares, things like cylinder sleeves and extra heavy bearings where others used a simple cast block and cruder bushings. Me, I had a '74 240D, diesel given to me, that when I finally gave it away had 350,000 miles on it. The rings and valve job it needed were beyond my budget. And it was on to the next freebie.
By comparison, a Chevy of that era, if it made it to 35,000, you were due to replace it, 70,000 and it would be literally remarkable and on its second or third engine and transmission.
What happened? Mercedes decided they wanted to compete with General Motors. Gradually, or not so gradually, they cheaped out to get the price down. Mercedes also went from a byword for reliability that was worth paying extra for to just another car, albeit an expensive and I would say overpriced one with few high end trappings like leather upholstery. Even the best ones they made at the top of the range suffered from this quality erosion.
Part of it , in US market, was the vanishing of their customer base, the better paid working professions and craftsmen who knew quaity because they produced quality themselves. Rather, it became either the rich, buying at Neiman Marcus or the rest of us, hitting the dollar store for something we knew we’d throw away fairly quick.A culture of greed, where you aspired to wealth by any means or resigned yourself to being ground down…
The rich will pay well, very well indeed for their toys, their trophies, as an ostentatious display rather than an intelligent appreciation of quality to use. The reputation is something that comes from rich idiots bragging to other rich idiots. If you want that market you have to crack that niche. And even then they will do their best to grind you down . that is in the main how they got rich after all. And they are fickle. there is always somebody who will make something that’s no better but they suck up better, flatter the egos of the rich a little more, however transparently.
As I said, you need to crack that niche to get the price. And once there, the kneepads will get a lot of use.Don’t get me started on why a guy who was trained to work on wooden commercial fishing boats got out of it and won’t work on rich people’s yachts.
That’s a long and angry story.
doc…
well read this whole thread…
then looked it up on the ‘‘Suf Shop’’’
it says …sold…
too bad , only one guy
didn’t ’ MISS ’ the opportunity to own it…
congradulations to the guy that is turning on that
swell sound of the fresh skill planer… my imagination
reels exstatickly … wow planer porn…
cheapskate sour grape nay sayers
happy camping with harbor freight smells of burning electric motors.
melting plastic bodies clogging dust shutes waiting for replacement parts
wondering what that screaming bearing is saying to your inner ear…
that first cut just makes me wanna go clean up my shop of hoarded
junk to shape a new fresh shape… that in itself
is worth a thousand bux I don’t have…
up the revolution
respect.
aloha from waipouli
…ambrose…
God bless Mr. skil planer .
Hi Ambrose, your post conjours up images/sounds/smells I’ve experienced. Terry Martin had told me to rely more on these things than science and engineering when it comes to shaping and planers.
Did you know the design which eventually became the Skil planer was invented by a butcher in Detroit? He was a hobby woodworker that made a prototype from a big hand plane and took it to his local hardware store who hooked him up with Skil in Chicago. Doctor Detroit I liked to call him. That guy sold the design rights, continued as a butcher, then bought a refined factory version from Skil for his hobby. Zappa once said: " Don’t you know? You could make more money as a butcher…" (Cosmik Debris 1974).
talk to the esoteric group in the room
stare into the blue campfire at the photo of
the family butcher [reno tognetti my daads soccer teamate
all state champs 1939?coach P.J prince}
in another life was the 6 degrees of seperation
connection to dropping in at 12 foot hanalei
in the dawn’s early light 1975…
yeah not the guy but to think the ripple effect
of a guy so remote to the apparent lives of
some guys like us so far removed from a butcher in ‘detroit’
holds a candle to the sun in these days
we deal with a sense of our own mortality.
who was that guy thaat handed me
my first planer in terry debardaladen’s parlor
after my mom drove me to the bank in linda mar…
a photo of this butcher guy on a t-shirt
moving a slice of the world population to tears
whadda short story construct to move a select
subculture …
there are rooms worldwide where these implements
rest on alters covered in dust where devotees
close the doors behind themselves
and chant mantras in sync with audio
from bethoven to taj mahal and back
to gabby pahinui and johnny kameaaloha almeida
and on to the spectrum to diick dale and up to
bud shank and dizzy gillespie infinitum …
only to open the one door to release
to the world another attempt to please
the greatest oceans fickle moods…
and Balboa came to the crest of the ridge
and beheld the vast blue and chose to call it
The Pacific that now owns the souls of many
a boy/man poor and rich alike only molecules in space.
…ambrose…
rest in peace Y
oh yeah
the guy that shaped a board
on a picnik bench turned
upsidedown with a sureform,
he was from san diego
he din’t even wait for a
delivery from harbor freight
in '68 sureforms cost $3.50
complete… why wait …
…ambrose…
Makes sense to me. But even Joe Biden makes sense to some folks. So what do I know?