My Hammer arrived ........ all hammered up!

[Darren Brown]

Well after 3 months of waiting, my Hammer A3-31 finally arrived yesterday. I was pretty excited for the arrival. The freight company gave me a window of 1 to 4. As I was washing my car in the driveway at 11:30 the tractor trailer pulls up. Perfect, I thought, now I won't be late for work. As the driver is pulling the pallet jack into my garage he says "I noticed a few holes in the box when I turned it around." Don't panic I tell myself, it could just be superficial packaging damage. "You'd better open it up and check it out," the driver says. So we open it up and of course it's damaged. The plastic cover on the end of the cutter head is smashed to pieces and the sheet metal under the right bed is all bent up. Felder tells me to refuse delivery and I have to watch as my jointer/planer is loaded back on the truck and driven away. WAAAAAAAAAH! Now I'm sure Felder will do right by me but who knows how long I'll have to wait now. Note to Felder: A little more substantial packaging would be nice. What ever happened to actual crates?

Best,

Darren

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[Randy Gazda]

That is a bummer.

[Van Huskey]

This is like an anti-gloat.. Sorry to see and hear it! There aren't many companies that still actually crate a machine. I have seen some packed and I swear I have NO idea how they ever survive, but the bean counters probably have it all figured out, or at least they think they do.

[John Morrison60]

Daren
What a blow to the midsection.

My father worked for a U.S. appliance manufacturer for years.
They would take new design washers & dryers and ship them with their
normal packaging. If they survived the shipping, they would lessen the
sheet metal, and ship them again, until they got to the point where they
all failed the shipping. They would then back up from there a bit.

Let's hope that is not what Felder is doing.
I never understood why the crating on such quality tools is so cheap.

Good luck with the replacement.
John

[Bill Huber]

I agree, what a bummer, I am not sure I could handle it and may have just kept that one and got new parts.

I see stuff coming though our docks all the time that the manufacture does not pack very good. The strapping will not even be tight some times and other times they just put one strap on while it should have 4.

We have to fix their problems so we can send it on its way, I work for Fedex.

[Greg Peterson]

Shipping companies move an extraordinary amount of freight. We received most of our inventory via freight. While most of it arrives in great condition, there are almost daily examples of how not to ship something. And then there are examples of where no reasonable amount of packaging would ever negate the abuse suffered in shipping. I swear it's like the shipping company went out of their way to damage the freight.

I think shipping departments all to often fail to engineer to the lowest common denominator. They assume that pallets won't get dropped, ran into other pallets, double stacked..... When I was a UPS shipper I packaged everything to survive a six foot fall onto concrete. Having a brother working at UPS, I've heard plenty of first hand horror stories of poorly packed goods.

Hopefully Felder will ship a replacement unit ASAP.

[Jason Roehl]

All good points, Greg. When I was still a student at Purdue, I worked at a replacement parts packaging warehouse, eventually moving into Quality Control/Inbound-Outbound. That meant I ended up driving a 24V forklift quite a bit. Sooner or later, stuff will happen. Seeing as how 98% of the employees there were students 18-22 years old, most of it happened sooner. But we weren't the only ones. There was nothing like being an hour from the end of the last shift for the day, only to open a dock door and find a truck that was a total disaster.

My most expensive boo-boo was when I was putting pallets of icemakers away in the racks. They would come on the trucks double-stacked, but could only be put away one at a time--each pallet was about 4 feet tall. So I was on a stacker (driver stands up and can face either direction while driving, extendable forks) and I grabbed the top pallet off the stack. I then turned around to drive facing "backwards" and headed for the racks. I started to lower the pallet, but I did it just a bit too soon--the pallet caught the top of the remaining one, holding it up just enough to pull it off my forks. When it was all said and done, I was able to cannibalize parts off a number of the icemakers that were broken in different ways and ended up with only about 6 or so that were not salvageable out of maybe 100 on a pallet.

Sorry about your hammered Hammer, Darren.

[Bruce Page]

Ouch! That has got to hurt! Hopefully Felder/Hammer will ship you a replacement quickly.

[Tony Shea]

That's a terrible story man. Too bad shipping is so hit or miss these days, especially substantial items like this that cost so much to ship in the first place. One would think companies would spend just a tad more money of packaging as well as shipping companies taking a bit more time transporting the items to make sure products are in their original state. I would think that in the long run this would save companies huge amounts of money in returned items. It just so happens that I seem to have the worst luck in the world when it comes to recieving damaged items, rarely do I ever get a good product the first time around. Should absolutely not be this way.

[Darren Brown]

Guys, thanks for all the support. When I told my wife what happened she says "what did I tell you about buying stuff over the internet?" Thanks honey, that makes me feel soooooo much better. I was very tempted to just keep the jointer/planer and have Felder/Hammer just send me replacement parts as most of the damage looked very superficial. My fear was that if it suffered a severe enough blow during shipping, everything could have been knocked so far out of alignment only the techs at Felder/Hammer would be able to get it readjusted back to factory new specs. A little more waiting is worth saving a lot of headaches later.

In a more positive light, this gives me a chance to reevaluate the method I was going to use to move the jointer from the garage to my basement workshop. I'm now thinking about installing some Zambus casters. My question to you all is do the casters come with the stud for mounting to the machine? It just doesn't show it on their website.

Best,

Darren

[Matt Wolboldt]

Hey Darren! I feel your pain. When I got my A3-31, there were a few holes in the box. Upon further inspection, those holes indicated pretty significant damage around the cutterhead. In addition to that, the tip-n-tell, was shatter and smashed. On the plus side, the folks at Felder took great care of me. Sorry to hear about the mishap.
-Matt

[Brendan Plavis]

You would think that 3.5k would buy alot of packing materials..... dang... that is awful.... hopefully they take care of you...

[Kent A Bathurst]

Sucks.

Wasn't personal, I wouldn't think , and you're dealing with a solid outfit.

Shake it off, and stay in the game. You won't even remember the story in a coupla years.

Best of luck.

[Dave Lehnert]

I think manufactures package things good for them to ship. They put things in shipping containers so things don't roll around. Probem is when retailers just use the same packaging to ship things to customers one at a time.

[Ed Griner]

Sorry to hear about your delivery problems.Felder is located just acrossed the delaware river in new castle,that is take #95 almost to their door.I live in so.jersey and had felder load my A3-31 in my ram van.I don't know how you feel about driving down,it would be about a three hour drive.I'd be inclined to think your damage happened between new castle and conn.. Good Luck/Ed