Scot Ferraro
12-23-2009, 1:04 AM
Hi everyone,
I wanted to post about some great customer service I received from Laguna Tools. I have owned an LT18 Bandsaw since 2001. It is a great machine. I was tensioning a blade yesterday and I heard a loud "bang", similar in sound to what you hear when a blade breaks. I opened the cabinet and the blade was fine. I found that I could not put any tension on the upper flywheel. This was around 4:55 PM. I know Laguna is open until 5:00 PM Pacific so I give their service department a call. I spoke to Erik there and he stayed late on the phone to help me trouble-shoot the issue. After about 20 minutes of checking the usual things (tension cable, trying a new blade, etc...) we find out the the upper assembly that tracks the upper blade and holds the spring had broken -- this is a cast-iron assembly. Erik asks me to send some pictures so that he can look into parts the next day (today).
I am thinking that this is 1. going to be very expensive to replace and 2. is going to take months to get the part in from Italy -- afterall, how many of these things actually break? I have never heard of it happening before.
Erik was on the case first thing this morning and by 11:45 AM he and Shawn Buinicky (Laguna's Manufacturing Engineer) had confirmed the problem and located a replacement part. Since I live locally, I was able to go to Laguna and pick everything up. Torben personally got involved as well to ensure that I had everything to fix my machine. I ended up getting an entirely new upper assembly with new springs, ACME threaded rod, etc... to ensure that nothing else was damaged. I brought in the old part and they were amazed at what had happened and it was the first that they had heard of it.
The best part is that they gave me all of the parts for free -- I was amazed. My saw is going on 9 years old and is well outside of any warranty and Laguna was perfectly happy to give me all of the parts I needed to get back up and running -- to me, that is customer service and it is refreshing to see a company stand behind their product, even after so many years. I got everything installed tonight and tested it and so far, it seems to be working fine. A true test comes this weekend when I finish some resawing for my current project.
I am very pleased with the outcome and think that Laguna Tools really came through for me.
I am attaching a couple of pictures of the damaged part if you are interested in seeing the damage -- one is what it looked like at the bottom of the saw and the other one is the part once removed from my machine.
Thanks!
Scot
I wanted to post about some great customer service I received from Laguna Tools. I have owned an LT18 Bandsaw since 2001. It is a great machine. I was tensioning a blade yesterday and I heard a loud "bang", similar in sound to what you hear when a blade breaks. I opened the cabinet and the blade was fine. I found that I could not put any tension on the upper flywheel. This was around 4:55 PM. I know Laguna is open until 5:00 PM Pacific so I give their service department a call. I spoke to Erik there and he stayed late on the phone to help me trouble-shoot the issue. After about 20 minutes of checking the usual things (tension cable, trying a new blade, etc...) we find out the the upper assembly that tracks the upper blade and holds the spring had broken -- this is a cast-iron assembly. Erik asks me to send some pictures so that he can look into parts the next day (today).
I am thinking that this is 1. going to be very expensive to replace and 2. is going to take months to get the part in from Italy -- afterall, how many of these things actually break? I have never heard of it happening before.
Erik was on the case first thing this morning and by 11:45 AM he and Shawn Buinicky (Laguna's Manufacturing Engineer) had confirmed the problem and located a replacement part. Since I live locally, I was able to go to Laguna and pick everything up. Torben personally got involved as well to ensure that I had everything to fix my machine. I ended up getting an entirely new upper assembly with new springs, ACME threaded rod, etc... to ensure that nothing else was damaged. I brought in the old part and they were amazed at what had happened and it was the first that they had heard of it.
The best part is that they gave me all of the parts for free -- I was amazed. My saw is going on 9 years old and is well outside of any warranty and Laguna was perfectly happy to give me all of the parts I needed to get back up and running -- to me, that is customer service and it is refreshing to see a company stand behind their product, even after so many years. I got everything installed tonight and tested it and so far, it seems to be working fine. A true test comes this weekend when I finish some resawing for my current project.
I am very pleased with the outcome and think that Laguna Tools really came through for me.
I am attaching a couple of pictures of the damaged part if you are interested in seeing the damage -- one is what it looked like at the bottom of the saw and the other one is the part once removed from my machine.
Thanks!
Scot