Originally Posted by
Patrick Chase
Steve, I think that your emotional investment in this topic is getting in the way of reasonable discussion. As a product designer I know where you're coming from, but all professionals have to eventually move past that.
As a designer I'm sure that you're well aware that there is no such thing as a perfect design. Even designs with unlimited budgets entail compromises. By the same token, everything can be rebalanced/reoptimized if not improved outright, so in that sense nothing is ever "done". That's why it's a great thing that there are so many to choose from and (though it may make you and other designers/vendors uncomfortable) discuss.
I never said that they needed a keyway or had a bad business model. W.r.t. the former I advanced a hypothesis as to why they may have removed the keyway that the Preston had. If like WM you advertise that you're producing an improved version of some existing design, then you are inviting discussion of the changes you make relative to that design, because those must either be things that you felt were improvements or things that you were forced to do for one reason or another (cost, material constraints, etc).
W.r.t. business model read what I wrote and more importantly what I was replying to. My comments were in response to somebody else's assertion that the customer was entitled to something extra in terms of service because their price was very high.
Patrick, the comments about the keyway, or the "bad business model," were made by other posters. I didn't attribute them to you, but perhaps I wasn't sufficiently clear about that. My bad.
Other than that, all your points above are good, but not really relevant to what I was/am saying. Let me try one more time: The OP has a plane with a defect. He should have contacted WM, who I am certain would repair or replace it, no questions asked. Instead, he posted this thread (in direct contravention of SMC policy, as I pointed out earlier; really, the whole mess should be deleted). The result has been a flood of baseless speculation. People have suggested that the design is flawed in numerous ways; they have intimated that WM might not stand behind their product, or are otherwise not entirely above board. None of this is appropriate because the premise, the whole basis for the thread, is flawed. All the speculation about design flaws ignores that this is almost certainly a case of a single defective part in an otherwise good product. The speculation about whether they stand behind their product, whether they'll take it back, their business model for God's sake, is all inappropriate because we have no information from the OP, or any other customer, about how WM treats returns.
You and I have both seen numerous threads that start like this: "I bought an LN/LV tool, it was defective, but I called customer service, they were awesome, they fixed it right away, no questions asked, yadda yadda." Well, that's what this thread should have been, too. But the OP didn't give them the chance to make it right before he posted.
With all that said, you're right that I'm too close to the subject, for both personal and professional reasons, and it's making me a little hot under the collar. I'll therefore excuse myself from the rest of the thread. Actually, I "retired" from posting here about six months ago, but this thread got my goat and lured me out. So, back to retirement for me, hopefully on a permanent basis.
"For me, chairs and chairmaking are a means to an end. My real goal is to spend my days in a quiet, dustless shop doing hand work on an object that is beautiful, useful and fun to make." --Peter Galbert