Soundsmith's turnaround time?

I received a phone call about this thread. I will respond to the many issues raised here, and post it here soon.

I want to gather my thoughts first, and respond in a thoughtful considered manner. Maybe to address the main thread here, I need to double my prices for retipping and cartridge rebuilding so I can be in line with the pricing of the rest of the retippers in the world, and hire a full time person to communicate better. With 150 - 200 Emails I get each day, many looking for free advice, it is a big job. Some of those complain as well, when I don't answer in 48 hours with free advice.

Emails are not perfect. Some Emails get lost in our mailwasher program. If we don't respond, we didn't get your Email. Try using a phone to reach us.

Yes, when I get a difficult cartridge, I put it aside to try to make a day's pay, and get to it late at night. The extra effort I make is to save someone's cartridge and their hard earned money, even if it needs extra work at no extra charge. Those DO get delayed. Maybe I do need to stop doing that and just give up on them, and their cartridge.

Again, I will respond fully soon here on this thread.

Peter Ledermann/Soundsmith

It is now Monday morning,and I have looked into Mr. Moffitt's cartridge issues. It was delayed due to:

1) The manner in which he sent it from England caused us to pay import duties for these two high end cartridges. They were held by UPS while we fought with them over this issue, which was never resolved. We finally had to pay to receive them.

2) One had been worked on by VDH, and has serious issues - I cannot tell when the serious damage to the suspension occurred. Repair is risky; it may fail completely during the attempt, at which point I do not get paid anything.
3) The other cartridge has some very serious manufacturing flaws. VERY serious. Then it was damaged by the customer. I have repaired the customer damage aspect, but need to see if there is a simpler way to resolve the GLARING manufacturing error. This cartridge NEVER worked properly, and it is a very, very high end cartridge.

As these were both seriously damaged and flawed units, I bypassed them to think about new ways of resolving their issues BEFORE contacting Mr. Moffatt above. I will now contact him with the rather limited possbilities. It may well be that I will lose all the time I have into BOTH these cartrdiges, and even more time lost if I attempt and fail.

I am constantly stretched between stopping what I am doing at the microscope and contacting customers. If I interrupted myself more, my throughput would be far less, and my rates would go up. Also, like your doctor, I might be forced to charge you whether I succeed or not.

I do stop from time to time, sit at my desk and make a series of calls. That is the most efficient way to work for me at this time. What I *should* put on our retipping/rebuilding page is that if you don't hear from me in the allotted time frame, your cartridge has more serious propblems than normally found, and I am trying to either be creative about how to rebuild it with new techniques for less cost to you, or find a VERY quiet evening to spend on it without interruption.

Unlike my verbal responses, I often fix tough problems by first thinking extensively.

Peter Ledermann/Soundsmith