Hi

Well, it’s been a funny old week! Last week finished well with my demo at Derbyshire Dales Woodcraft Club, thank you for the very warm welcome folks. It kind of went downhill from there, we discovered a problem with Safety Cloth (yes, really!), more of which later, and I wasn’t feeling very well.
I tested for covid and came up positive, so I’m trying to work from home for the rest of the week, although I feel like I’ve played a five-set match, with tiebreakers, against Rafa Nadal!
So this week’s Newsletter might end up a bit rambly and possibly incoherent – although you might not notice the difference…

As mentioned, we detected a problem with Safety Cloth. It’s hard to think that something so simple could misbehave, but a mix-up with our suppliers has caused a slight problem. They improved the quality of the cloth, improving the tensile strength of it. This means that while it will still tear, it’s not as quick as we’d like. It’s easy to tell if you’ve got some that has been affected – look carefully and you’ll see that it has an embossing of moons, clouds and stars. Just don’t make yourself cross-eyed by looking for it to hard, it might not be there!
We’ve already replaced a lot of cloths, if you use Safety Cloth please check what you have. If yours is affected, send us a picture of it along with how many you have and your address, and we’ll get replacements out to you.

Another question this week validly queried our carriage charges on our website. They’d ordered two packs of Foam Brushes and the site had automatically added a £6 delivery charge – that seemed a bit high, why did it happen?
The answer is simple; we’re not clever enough to program our site to differentiate between the products and charge different rates. We’ve tried, but it always messes up something else.
Probably 95% of the parcels we send out contain hazardous goods, and can’t be sent by post, so the carrier’s delivery cost is automatically added. But we do monitor all the orders that come in, and if we’re able to send one as a large letter we make a refund accordingly. This has always been standard practice for us.

And I’m afraid that’s where I’m going to have to leave it for this week. I’ve had to cancel a couple of demos, one on Friday and another on Tuesday. Hopefully I’ll be clear after that. I’m sorry to everyone I’ve had to let down. I’ve managed to avoid this thing for a couple of years, but it got me in the end.

I wonder if anyone else has had a bad week… oh, hang on. I can think of someone…

I’ll see you in seven, hopefully a bit more with it by then!

Cheers

Terry