JimTimber

I've seen the Boss first hand and there's nothing about that machine that needs cast iron for the body as long as wear surfaces were sleeved/inserted with a more durable material. Did they cheap out back in the day? I can't comment on that. I've never looked closely at them.

Kubota makes tractor rear ends (traditionally made of cast iron) out of aluminum. Boeing makes airplanes out of aluminum. Rock climbers trust their lives to aluminum all the time... The design needs to account for the characteristics of the material it's to be made of.

One could be added to the end of the original one, but it would be custom made.

You need a licensed prefix to use a UPC. $250 to buy the prefix and 10 numbers, then $50 a year to maintain it. GS1 is the officiating outfit.

You can go down to a 110/18 needle on a 441 clone. It makes the same size hole as a smaller machine.

I'm guessing it was a scam and got pulled. 0 feedback seller and one listing.

You seal the ends to prevent them from drying faster than the middle (which is what causes the "check". Checking is the technical name for a stress crack in wood). The grain of the wood is actually made up of thousands of little tubes that are filled with various levels of water depending on where in the log they're located. Heart wood is dryer, because it's not the "live" wood of the tree (that's the sap wood around the outside edge). Trees grow up when they're young, then start growing outward once the tree hits it's peak height adding growth rings at each spurt of growth (usually around 4 a year). "Old growth" trees are more sought after because they grew slower under natural succession (more competition for sunlight = slower growth = tighter grain). Without that competition, the tree grows a lot faster and puts on more growth per spurt and has looser grain, while getting bigger in a shorter time period. Bark seals the water in and will allow fungus and mold to thrive. Get that off so the sap wood can breathe, and seal the ends so they can't - that's your best bet for an air dried log. Still no guarantee you won't get checking, but it does help keep it to a minimum. If the stump is brought inside before being exposed to much outside contamination, you can leave the bark on and leave the ends bare. I did it with the log my anvil lives on, and it checked a bit but not enough to pose a problem. I didn't know what I do now when I cut the green ash it came from (10 years ago), so I would do it differently today.

Get the bark off it pronto! Painting the ends will only possibly prevent checking (cracks radial to the diameter), and will slow the overall drying. You're looking at more than a year. Hardwood dries 1" per year when cut into boards (2" = 2 years, etc). If you have a wood stove or fireplace, you might speed the process but risk inducing cracks from uneven drying.

You could narrow up the teeth, keep your SPI, and reduce the spacing at the same time. No new blank and much quicker to second test. I used to do everything with a jig saw, sawzall, or angle grinder. Been there, and feel your pain. Doing knives, a mini-mill might be worth the $$$.

CNC is great for complex shapes and repetition. For a simple pattern, a manual will do just fine and will be faster - no touching tools off, fixturing, edge finding, etc. Just line up the material to the cutter and start making chips. There's a lot of work that comes before you push the green button on a CNC mill.

Manual mill will do that quicker than you can draw the CAD file to write the program off of.

I thought they were lovely and well priced given the materials and finish. Inspired me to look around for something to make my own that's a little nicer than a hunk of aluminum. Kudos for not racing to the bottom.

The theme in the supplier threads lately has been that leather workers will never be happy. I owe Rusty and SLC a public apology for my participation in the other locked thread. My dissatisfaction in the size of the remnants overshadowed the quality of the leather in them. I've looked through one of the bags (they didn't want them back) and if I had different needs, I would've been delighted with what they sent. So if Weaver's policies rub you wrong, then don't buy from them. Companies raise prices to eliminate customers all the time. Sometimes growing your capacity costs more than it's worth, so the logical solution is to reduce your demand by raising prices to shave off that bottom tier while keeping the people who keep your margins up.

If you haven't found out how racist St Cloud is, you just haven't been there long enough. You're also likely white, which means you're not going to be treated to it the same as if you weren't. It was racist against the non-Somali African immigrants long before the Somali influx. My Asian friends were also treated differently in St Cloud - I witnessed it first hand. That you don't know the difference between Minneapolis proper, North Minneapolis, and every other suburb in the 500+ square mile 7-county metro is also indicative of why you don't know that the 45 mile distance dividing the areas also has a large phase shift from how things work down here. Andover is only about 10 miles from the concrete jungle of what people associate with "Minneapolis" and there's still active farms there. You can go a matter of blocks and change your world in this area.

You're buying on price alone, but you want the service that comes with retail pricing at the wholesale rate. That's how businesses fail. Do you want the supplier to go out of business because they made you happy and had no profit to show for it? When you spend all your time dealing with the little people and then cut your profit to make them happy, that's when you decide the business of being their slave isn't worth it and you close shop. Now your "loyalty" has cost you their services. The Walmart model doesn't work with leather. You have a high quality expectation, which takes trained people to make good decisions when filling orders. What grade leather goes in the box? I've never seen a laser marking of a hide's grade, so you can't say "put this in this order" to just anyone and expect it to be right - those employees capable of doing it cost money. Maybe not money in wages (because order picking still doesn't pay much, and sewing labor sure looks cheap from the want ads I've seen in MN), but you will have to spend money in screw ups and time teaching them what makes an A, B, utility, or whatever hide. I've learned a lot about this business in the short time I've been around this forum. I would NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER sell hides.

Never heard of Costco or Sam's Club?

Wholesale pricing is meant to reward the volume buyer with tiered discounts to offset the lack of personnel time the business has to devote to servicing those transactions, as well as mitigating their exposure to returns and other quality/CS interactions (retail in general has a return rate somewhere around 10% - 1 in 10 sales will come back and cost you money as a reseller). If you don't meet their buying criteria, it's reasonable to assume they think you encumber them as much as any other retail customer and they're right in charging you accordingly. I don't see the problem here.

I can affirm your assertion. St Cloud is a magical place that has all the illusions of being a modern society, but in fact is made up of knuckle draggers and a transient population of students and the support roles that accompany them. The outlying population is amongst the most racist people I've ever experienced. Some of the immigrant populations give good reason to form negative opinions, however I've never stooped to assert it had any relation to their ethnicity, rather a lack of comprehension that lower-central Minnesota is not run like Somalia. I.e. wildlife present in the community park is not free-range food (might want to keep a close eye on your pets btw). I spent 2.5 years there finishing my bachelor's at St Cloud State (6 semesters), and would've had a job teaching in the film department had I wanted it. I never applied. I saw my time there like a prison sentence; something which must be served to move beyond, not a joyous experience I wanted to keep enduring indefinitely. I don't imagine much has improved in the past 15 years. I have friends who live around the area, and they all want to move out too.

My pursuit would be with the seller, not UPS. Seller failed to deliver on their end of the transaction; THEY contracted with UPS in this instance and THEY failed to ensure that shipment would be covered if it didn't make it intact (which it did not). I send product across the country daily, and I choose not to insure it. If something gets lost/damaged in transit, that's on ME (the risk has proven to be minimal thus far and insurance is a big percentage of the actual value when I'm sending wholesale quantities). My buyer paid for delivery of perfect merchandise, it's on me to make that happen or they shouldn't have to pay because I didn't fulfill my side of the deal. Saying "Oh, your stuff got wrecked by the courier, good luck!" is not good business. The notion that a buyer needs to buy extra insurance is novel. The buyer is not the one taking the risk when that item leaves their possession, the seller is - it's in the seller's best interest to insure high value items to protect themselves from being out the money if they're not received intact. Cost for such coverage should be included in the agreed upon shipping rate no different than the cost for your electric bill and rent is included in the sale price of anything you sell.

Single account (one email address) and multiple buyers info and shipping addresses? Don't save your CC info on the account and it shouldn't be a problem.

Glad that was resolved for you.

That 3200 is probably a good choice. Belts might seem easy, but I wouldn't trust running one on my Singer 211G that wasn't a dress belt not intended to support a gun. Any gun belt weight would be too much for the 211G despite it being able to sew 1/8" veg tan to chrome tan pretty easily. The 3200 is rated for 5/8" IIRC, and that'll give you some options you wouldn't have with a typical "leather" bed type sewing machine. You can also add a table to a cylinder arm if you end up wanting some more support for the work. Sewing a circular end on a bag with a bed machine is a great way to pull your hair out - especially if the material has any body to it. I did some coat cuffs on my Singer, and attempted a bag end. Didn't have my 441 clone at the time of the cuff repairs (sure would've worked a lot better!), and I gave up fighting the bag to then load the 441 with 69 thread, bought size 19 needles for it, and was much much happier with the results.

Bring what you need sewn with. Will it do it (can the machine punch the holes and make a lock), will it do it satisfactorily (loops on the back side, unable to pull the top thread up, etc)? I bought a $10 no name Chinese made "instructors" belt off amazon to free up one of my 5.11 Tactical belts from my hunting clothes (only used a couple three weeks a year) and also to see what they were delivering for that "bargain" price (5.11's are $32 on sale and worth the $40 they normally go for). Well, the bottom tension on the seam was through the roof and none of it was locked. Since it's only holding my insulated pants on, I'm not fixing it, but there's someone in SE Asia running the wrong settings on their box-cross machine. Having sewn a number of webbing straps myself, I know that getting the needle size right to make the hole big enough to pull the thread after you've packed the piece full of tight stitches can take some trial and error. Big needle also means likely pulling the bottom thread up through the hole in the first few stitches, so getting the tension balanced perfect takes some doing. It's not as easy as it looks or seems.

Might want to close up that glue bottle.

If you want to devote your life to stopping junk mail, I'll cheer you on. It's not a battle I choose to engage in. When we relocate to Crow Wing County, I'll see it as free kindling for the fire pit. Life's too short to worry about things I cannot stop, think positive. They're sending you free fire starters and glue over-spray protection for your work surface. Logging (required for the paper) is actually beneficial to the environment since we've stopped allowing forest fires to reset the age of our timber stands.