I would like to personally apologize to anyone here that feels that I abandoned this thread in any way and to let you that we have not and will not abandon it. We have been working diligently on all of our mods including the new aluminum line we have and I would like to fill everyone in on how our order process works. A little over two and a half years ago when we started we only offered what you see is what you get mods and that is how we always wanted to keep it but even when we had well over 100 mods in stock we still were constantly bombarded with requests for wood combinations other than what we had available and decided it might be better to offer a custom order process along with our in stock mods so we then started accepting orders from customers that could choose every option they wanted ( which there has never been a requirement that anyone who wishes to purchase one of our mods HAS to place a custom order and wait for it to be built and instead could just wait for more in stack boxes to be added ). Still today as it was back then as soon as a custom order is placed we begin working on it immediately which every box begins from a wood blank and is milled and worked into shape which requires gluing and lacquer of course which takes the most time due to dry times. We have never had a list where we write down everyone's name and then work on the boxes in that order so many times orders that were placed after another order will ship so we do not ever have any custom order just sitting around waiting to be started, Instead at all times even today at any given time we are working on around 70 boxes per week which sounds like quite a few when it is written down but in reality we are able to produce about 130 boxes a week without having to work 24 hours a day and any time we approach around 80-90 boxes we shut custom ordering down to prevent us from having to work ourselves to death and does happen from time to time but rarely. The biggest problem I knew we would face is impatient customers which trust me I know all to well myself and when it comes to working with wood and especially exotic woods nothing is definite like working with plastic or metal, Instead with wood there are many more things to go wrong than right such as warping, cracking, checking, ect... Many times with a
mod we will not see some imperfections until the first couple of coats of lacquer are sprayed and the box pops as it is called and at that point minor defects appear like a sore thumb and in some cases we can fix them very quickly and in others we make a judgement call on whether to scrap the box or fix it and in all honesty many of them could be fixed and chances are nobody would ever notice the difference but the problem is I will and to me that is not acceptable. Out of around 70 boxes a week there are roughly three or four that we just have to scrap and start over with or replace a door or cap on so in some cases we do run way behind on an order to ensure that we provide a
mod that is completely defect free and something we are confident will last well over our year warranty with proper care. I have to chuckle a little every time we get the question " Are these made in China " but we do get that question a lot and what customers need to realize is that you are purchasing something that is hand made and not some cheap mod that is very readily available. There are many times that we are to the point of being ready to assemble the electronics in a box and ship it and we see that a check or flaw appeared and then the order gets delayed again which is in our quality check before the electronics are installed and as I said I understand how bad you want to get your mod but please keep in mind that quality is extremely important to us and if we have to delay a box to make sure it is perfect then we have to make that call. Some of the woods like Ebony, Cocobolo and very tight grained woods are very difficult to work with and produce a natural oil that when attempting to glue if not done correctly will separate so many of those boxes will be delayed if we run into problems and we must take great care when working with to make sure that the box does not come apart. I have been and always will be the first to admit that I am no web designer or computer tech and things go wrong and I have to rely on others to fix the issue. We have had our fair share of problems from day one with servers and programs and is absolutely no excuse by any means and problems like that are 99% of the time completely out of our control but of course ultimately we are responsible and we must apologize constantly for. As many of you know we moved to a new hosting company a few months back because of a hard drive failure at our hosting company which resulted in a loss of almost 1/3 of our entire site of which we had no backup of because it happened so fast so we had to build a new site from scratch and attempt to get everything back up and operational as quickly as possible which was extremely unexpected and for us difficult because what took well over a year to build we managed to get done in about 10 days which for us was good as I am sure many of you could do it a lot faster. The current server we are on with our new hosting has been good with the exception of email issues that arose entirely by us reacting to customers stating they could not contact us and that our emails were not getting to them and ended up being a huge mistake on our part because where there was no problem in the first place we managed to create one by trying to fix a non existent problem so if anyone did not receive an email we apologize and although we thought as of the 14th of August the issue had been fixed we found that the raid hardware on our server failed and had to be replaced which at the time we were told that it was not a big deal it ended up taking a week for our hosting company to get it fixed due to high load and then a DDOS attack on the 19th just made things even worse. During that time we could not access much of anything for very long and as our new integrated shipping software was installed nothing worked right. In the end as I said I will make no excuse for delays in a few customers orders because ultimately in the end we are responsible for them please keep in mind that we do everything we can to get your orders out as quickly as possible but as it states on our site and always has we will not rush to get it done and sacrifice any quality because that is not fair for our customers and reflects badly against us. I apologize for writing a novel here but please just have some patience and I can guarantee that everyone will be taken care of and there is absolutely nothing to worry about.
and is that a 10ml bottle?
