Originally Posted by
David Weaver
This process is screaming for a grinder, but steve may have slowed it down for instructional purposes. I'm sorry to see that he got taken for a $180 ride with that diaflat (my opinion, of course - I purchased one of those and sent it to stu as part of our usual horse trading).
Separate and aside from Steve, If LN is savvy, they'll send a few of these stones to more vocal forum members, bloggers and magazine writers and all of the sudden, you'll see them being used and assume approval by association. When you are vocal and you have some exposure, you start getting things to "test", and not part of a back and forth sort of break-even kind of thing like stu and I do (sometimes it turns into a pissing contest, I think). It more of a "hey, we'll send you some tools and you get to keep them". Quite often they're the final iteration, so there is little purpose in asking someone to "test" the tools, it seems more to me like priming the pump. (I say separate and aside from this, because I have no reason to believe Steve is doing that, and I don't know anyone who has received LN stuff, they do a pretty good job of avoiding the forum culture). I've received other stuff, mostly stuff I've asked about, though.
There is a lot of traffic, especially on the power tool side of things, where bloggers claim to "review" tools, but they never have any reviews that lead you to believe any of the tools are unfit for use. And a lot of them are unclear about whether or not they received the tools for free, dodging the question by saying "no I don't get paid" and "look, I still work out of my garage", that kind of stuff. I thought there was a law passed not that long ago that required full disclosure of items received for free or receiving any other compensation when blogging about goods, but it appears to have had little effect. Any time I've commented on any of those blogs that the "reviews" sounded more like stealth ads, the folks running them have feigned offense. It's business. Even if it's someone driving their ego and wanting to be the point person for beginners, etc, it's business. Not all compensation is money, but the risk of bias is the same.
(i'm not sure why I went into that...short on the coffee this morning, though).