I plan to send the following note to Christian Oltzscher, the president of Festool USA on Tuesday morning. Please send me any comments, corrections, suggestions, and additions before then.

It turns out that the note is too big to enter in one segment into this forum -so I have divided it into three parts.


Part 1:

Christian, I am sending you some suggestions about Festool Systainers on behalf of many of the members of the Saw Mill Creek Woodworking forum (www.sawmillcreek.org).

First of all, let me introduce myself. I am a recently retired computer programmer and am currently building a woodworking shop in my back yard. Early this year, I first heard about Festool on the Saw Mill Creek forum and I have already purchased three of your tools as well as two extra systainers. I really like your tools -they have already saved me time and resulted in better quality on several projects; most notably in the construction of my workshop. Over time, I plan to purchase several more. I am a big fan of your systainers. I currently have five and I believe that, once I obtain a few more, they will solve the tool and parts organization and transportation problems that have plagued me forever. I have built systainer inserts for a non-Festool drill and for screws, nails, etc. I have even built my own box out of (mostly) scrap wood that holds guide rails and related parts (a couple of photos are attached) and painted the box in the Festool colours.

But nothing is perfect. In a recent thread on the subject of what people do with the cases that tools come in, systainers received both praise and adverse criticism from several members. I started another thread specifically about systainers in order to gather more comments. The net of all this is that we have two suggestions for Festool:

(1) The quality of the plastic inserts provided to hold tools such as saws and routers is inferior to the quality of the systainer itself and to the tools. This is particularly surprising in light of the way Festool promotes the durability of its systainers for professionals on the job site. 18 people commented on this.

_ I, for one, would pay more money (on top of the very high price I am already paying) for better quality inserts.

(2) In USA/Canada, just as it does in some other regions, Festool should provide the option for purchasing tools without a systainer. 5 people either suggested this directly or said that they do not use the systainers.

Below is a list of Forum members with their comments re systainers. The list is in alphabetic order of member surname.