JimTimber

Light boxes are nifty and all, but you can get by with a half yard of some non-competing fabric. The towel is nicer than the expanded steel it's hiding, but if you had a not-too-busy rustic swatch behind it, it'd set the piece off. Amazon required plain white backgrounds, and that took some doing as there's shadows if you're not using a light box. I just edited out the gradients to make it work and played with the light angle as best I could. Here's a frame I'm selling and just threw it on a piece of ballistic nylon I happen to be making a bag out of at the moment. $7/yd and you've got a clean slate. The broken edge on the top right is the box for the frame and is visible in the other pic I have posted with the listing. 30 second ad prep with natural light.

So your urethane is shot?

I'm down in the Cities.

What's odd is that the riveted plates have been removed, but the warning sticker remains. I took the warning stickers off mine before I ever put thread in it.

Oh, I always ask about veterans discounts. I'm not opposed to them, but there's also a bunch of sleazy people who abuse it and lie to get the benefit which is why I've never offered one myself. In reality, we should just be tax exempt. Now that'd be a kick-azz veteran's discount!

Veteran status isn't meant to differentiate quality. We had each other's backs in the service and we have each other's backs as civilians. It's a calling card letting other vets know we're on the same team. I've had people say I should put more emphasis on the fact I'm a service connected disabled vet (I got hurt, its not something I'm proud of). Enlisting is something I did for my own reasons (wasn't drafted, wasn't even alive when there was a draft), and it's part of who I am, but it's not why you should buy my stuff. You should buy my stuff because it's competitively priced and it's way better than the competition. Hipsters and old ladies like stories. Some of those people have $$$$ to spend on the guy who took the longest to make their belt. They gloat about it at afternoon tea with the other old bags they hang out with. Because you don't fall for the craftsman's shtick doesn't mean it isn't working for them and producing sales. The slow people's stuff is exclusive - they don't work fast enough to make a bunch of them.

You need to add that mark-up into your pricing. Considering they're going to have to deal with the customer, you have less work involved in those sales and that's where their margins come in. Wholesale is usually somewhere between 50% and 75% of retail. You've gotta be some hot stuff to command more than that and get dealers who want to sell your stuff to make less than 25% of the sale for their investment. Lets say you sell an item direct for $50. We know you have $10 in material, and you spent some time on it so you need to get paid for that too. Our total cost is $25 for the sake of argument (took 30 minutes and we like making $30/hr so that's where our $15 came from), and we retail them direct to consumer for a handsome 100% mark-up (not bad, but not a "Shark Tank, we're headed for Billionaire" margin either). Figuring it takes you about 10 minutes to talk to the customer, get their payment situated, and package the item for shipping or what have you, there's another $5 they just burned up, and then the credit card people are going to take their 3%, and the Fleabay people are going to take their 15%, boxes and stuffing aren't free either, then there's the keying up the postage... See where I'm going here? You can wholesale a box of 10 for $35 and make more money than selling direct, plus you just got $350 in cash in one shot. Boo ya! Dealer is making $15 on every $35 investment for a tidy 33% and they're happy too. Dealers also expose people to you and add value in marketing your brand. Don't look at them as just another mouth to feed off your labor - if they're making money, you're making money too (or you shouldn't be in business).

If you're not getting a push back on price from about 25% of your customers, you're not charging enough. I make specialty gun parts and I have a very specific client targeted - the un-tactical. Well, one of my dealer friends said I should lower my price, increasing my sales and thus making more money in volume: the Walmart model. Another well-meaning friend tried getting me a contract deal with a major manufacturer to license the design and get a royalty off their massive sales volume potential. Lets examine those two approaches for a minute. The Walmart model sounds great, right? Sell zillions of do-dads for a slim profit but in the end you get a pile of money. Except if you're investing a lot of time in your production and quality control, lowering your price means you make less money the more you sell. If you sell 10 items a month at $40, you get $400. If you sell 1000 items a month at $40 you get $40,000, and you have a LOT of time tied up in handling all those extra sales, you have logistics issues, you have capital tied up in inventory and supply streams, and likely employees. But the Walmart way says we need to be Cheap Cheap Cheap to move that much product, so we need to knock that $40 down to $5 to hit our sales volume. That $40K just turned into $5K and you had $4,500 in labor to make it happen. You did 100 times more work for 25% more money and you haven't seen your kids other than in passing in 27 days. Walmart only works when you can make money at the $5 margin, and then you can make it up in volume. Then there's the licensing approach. You come up with the design, they pay you a royalty of about 3-5%, and you collect the money while they do all the work. Woo Hoo, I'm rich! Right? No, because if you're in a tiny little market and they sell your stuff for what you did, but they sell 1000x more of it, you're only getting 5% off the top. $50 per 1K units sold doesn't buy too much, and you'd be better off selling 10 of them at full price. This is a lesson that a sales manager friend of mine taught me when I was 19. "Work less, make more." Not "work more, make more" as is so often the mantra. If you can carve out a premium spot for yourself, you'll be able to charge higher prices and people will be willing to pay them, even if 25% are grumbling when they get the bill. There's still people out there who think the price tag dictates the quality, so add on a few bucks for good measure and send out the calling card for those people. Don't go chasing the bottom feeders, you'll only end up broke with them. Lastly, it's easy to discount an item if it doesn't sell at a higher price. Once you've established a cheaper price as the item's value, it's really hard to increase it without losing customers.

Yeah, but shipping might kill the deal. Here's the CL ad:https://minneapolis.craigslist.org/wsh/bfs/6008010338.html I got him down to $2200 and only had to drive about 40 miles to pick it up.

A somewhat local business bought 4 of these direct from Keestar and then the owner decided he wasn't going to pursue the product he'd bought them to make. He had assembled one and I was able to inspect and demo it, which left me with a good feeling about the machine and the deal (no dealer support, although Keestar states they have a lifetime warranty as well). I took my "new in the sealed boxes" machine home and set it up. This has an 800W servo motor and a gear reducer, but the table wasn't originally designed for the reducer and the belts didn't fit right with it installed (the original belt worked as-delivered without modification if the reducer wasn't used). That was easily rectified with 3 new holes for an alternate motor mounting position, and a trip to the store for a new belt or 10 (seriously, I bought a lot of belts to get the length right, then returned the ones I didn't need). I also needed to carve out the belt opening a little for the machine to reducer as the front edge of the final drive belt would rub if I hadn't. I'm not impressed with the quality of the table's legs and may very well build a new one for it at some point. For now, it's 100% functional and I'm able to sew. The machine came with (3) #27 needles which are a little big for my needs right now, so I placed an order for more with The Thread Exchange and also picked up some 346 in addition to another 10# grab box of nylon/poly (this one was even better than my last box - very happy with the gamble!). Those arrived today, and I got to loading up the bobbin and threading the machine. This is the very first piece of material the machine has ever seen. I set the stitch length to near maximum for the first pass, then reduced it a little, then reduced it a little more. The second stitch was started forward, reversed to back stitch, then ran forward to complete the seam and that's why it's 3 threads thick. Everything is hitting the same holes, and I'm delighted. The only other adjustment I've made was to reduce the top thread tension since it seemed excessive when I was threading it. #22 needle (yes, it's a little big but the smallest I currently have) with 69 thread. I melted my tails with a lighter. Top: Bottom: I'm a very happy camper right now.

Is this to add tension or remove it?

I must have belly chunks then. They don't tool for squat, but the holster is no different than when I made it 6 years ago. Since it's entirely inside my pants or behind my gun against my skin, I really couldn't care less what definition it has or not.

What's so bad about the neck and belly areas? I like the black one better too. They both look nice. The cant of the brown one looks a little shallow and for me would be harder to draw. I've got a 22 degree cant (often called the FBI cant) on my IWB and find that it's more comfortable for all day carry because it rides behind my hip bone when seated (4 O'clock position), and it's easier to draw. I can sleep on top of a 2011 in my holster - it's that comfy.

Oh, I can relate to that too.

It was his (the one he was keeping out of the 4 he'd bought), but that's good to know. I need to order some bigger thread and smaller needles. I got my belts figured out today, but needed to catch up on missed sleep so I haven't finished installing the motor control yet. Once that's done, she's ready to sew but I don't have any appropriate needles either so I won't be doing much with it until those arrive.

That's nuts Wiz! I'm not sure I'd attempt something of that design. I follow what you're saying about opening up the throat for accepting the thicker material. That's good info for sure. I didn't touch any of the settings and it's possible the foot would've mashed it and gone over the bump if I'd tried, but I was already getting a lot of needle deflection from whatever reduced needle size he'd installed. I want to say it was a #24 (277 thread), and it wasn't poking straight while I was rapidly just trying to get used to the foot pedal, hunched over, and on one foot (I've had both knees carved on in the past 8 months and I'm not overly steady like that just yet). I also fed that wad of webbing in as my first stitches. I should've started with the doubled up bit and added to it, but I also was most curious how sewing that much meat would feel. It worked great! Now that I know how the hook interfaces with the needle scarf, I'm even more impressed that it didn't drop any stitches despite the needle being sent into the bottom plate at a leftward angle.

I could've gotten cheaper pulleys, but these will add more mass to my flywheel. The surplus bearing shaft was just a little too short so I got creative and fixed it. I still need to make my bracket and get it mounted. This'll go under my 211G with the servo. Ag gear reducers are way overbuilt (mine's way overbuilt too, that's a huge fan bearing with a 3/4" shank) and will have a lot of input loss from the oil bath. Not as bad as a worm drive, but not as good as a typical ball bearing jack shaft like everyone uses for sewing machine reducers. You're going to need 2 pulleys with any gearbox you choose just to adapt it. The bearing I bought was $6. Sometimes buying something specific is cheaper than adapting something that's free.

Cast iron has a lot of graphite in it. You can lube when tapping, but it's usually not detrimental if you don't. It's a nice video. How do you like the guide now that you have it?

This webbing is the densest stuff I've ever seen. The 441 will go through it as fast as I'm comfortable with. When I saw the pics of sewing phone books, I realized there's really nothing I can hit it with that'll do more than break a needle or maybe nick the hook if it goes real wrong. Keep your fingers out of the way - they're probably not too much of a challenge either. It's an inch at the folds, and the foot didn't want to walk up it, but I have no idea how the guy had his set up (this was done on his he'd assembled, mine was in the factory sealed boxes). I need a shorter belt before I can put mine under power.

I bet Uwe's extended lever is just plain easier to use even without the guide. I'll have to check my bits to see if anything's close enough to 10mm. I got a Keestar 441 yesterday and almost have it ready to sew.

Worm drives don't move too well in reverse (meaning movement applied to the output shaft rather than the input shaft). It'll be like your brake is locked on all the time unless you're actually using the motor under power to turn the flywheel. I would not recommend one of those for this application. It'll be a nightmare to sew with.

The logistics just didn't work out for me. 4 days on the road is a no-go. Good luck with the sale!

Is the drop down guide better than the bed mounted one?

Is this still available?

Thanks! After getting one side done, I discovered something - 2 is going to be heavy. lol I'm going to make this one into a pouch for hunting and will revise the pieces I have cut for the other one into a more traditional hull bag with ammo pouch.