Sept Update

Where the did September go? Can’t believe Oct is almost halfway over.

Sept was mostly filled with getting my office and workshop organized, including digging thru boxes of old parts I hadn’t looked at in years. I’m really happy to have a clean, organized workspace now and am already seeing an improvement in my efficiency and I can actually find a tool or part without a hour-long search.

It’s taking longer than expected to get the website changes made, but it’s starting to happen. My first priority is to streamline the checkout process and provide an alternative to PayPal for paying.

I did finally make some adjustments to our pricing — the biggest change is that I separated out the shipping costs. “Free” shipping has always been a bit of a misnomer, as someone always has to pay the shipping costs and in the past I built it into the price of our products. You can still get free shipping if your order total is enough (currently $60 or more to get free shipping in US). The end result is that our prices did go up a bit, but I’m actively looking at more ways to reduce costs and pass the savings along.

I’ve also been spending a lot of time making CAD models of guitar parts. Eventually I hope to have 3D models of a complete Rock Band guitar so we can print replacement parts for anything that might break on a guitar. A lot of part models I’ve found online were either not designed to be printed, were missing features or were just plain wrong, so I’m starting from scratch for most models. I’ll be putting the files on the website when they are ready.Winter is coming, as autumn fades and a cold wind arrives.

Here in Montana October means winter is just around the corner and we’ve already got snow in the mountains. While I enjoy getting out in the snow, I’m not ready to hang up the mountain bikes yet so hopefully we’ll get a few more nice days before the snow sticks for the next 6 months.