Considering that we are a very small firm, it is hard to travel away and meet customers outside the shop. That is a shame, because it is a lot of fun and rewarding to meet people; the same when customers come into the shop, you get the chance to talk to someone interested in the same things. I remember how lonely it felt to go to work during the pandemic; we chose to be at the shop alone so as to reduce the risk of infection, but they became very long, dull days. This very fact, that we are few, is the reason the opening hours are what they are; outside work the families are waiting with everything that entails. If you have school-age children, time is tight, so there is a lot of work after bedtime or, like today when they are at school, catching up from home. But sometimes it happens: we travel off and meet you. Last year we were at Gunnebo Castle outside Gothenburg and had a nice weekend. We decided quite quickly to go this year too if it happened, and this year it is an even bigger event with more exhibitors, so it will be interesting to be there. So we are packing part of our range and driving the good 4 hours from Stockholm with the car full of books, tools and other things that may be interesting. The theme is Food and Craft, so that is where we concentrate on what is brought along. If anyone is planning to go and would like to look at a particular product, get in touch with us before Wednesday so we have time to pack it. More information is here. We hope to meet as many of our west-Swedish customers as possible. We will also have our Saturday openings again this autumn; we will post the dates on the website shortly.
Already in the first faltering steps of Rubank Verktygs we sold books, and since Lost Art Press came into our range the selection has grown every year. We really love books; we have written about it in earlier newsletters and recently we have searched through the Swedish publishers for books about woodworking, craft and sloyd. We find more and more titles and post them as quickly as we can. We are also looking for books for our library. We wrote about that earlier too and several of you have been in touch about donating books. Now we take a further step and offer you to donate or sell your books to us. We take care of the shipping if you can't come to the shop. We want to take responsibility for gathering the knowledge of our history in these subjects for younger generations and also give interested people the opportunity to read these books. So get in touch if you have books that you no longer feel are of any use on your bookshelves. If we get several copies of the same title, we sell them via the website and use the money to collect more books for the library.
After all the fuss last summer with emails sent without any reason, we just want to write that, in case you missed it, we got Incra in the middle of the holiday, a couple of months earlier than they had said when we ordered 15 months earlier. The stock is well filled with all their products in metric versions where both kinds exist. For example, all models in their Miter Gauge Family are available (here is a pdf with a description of all models). If you wonder what is needed to use these, these are the values needed, for example, for Miter Gauge 1000 (18, SE and HD).
Even if you don't have a 3/4" slot in your saw, we now have rails from Incra, Veritas and Kreg that hold the right dimensions if you make an extra panel that perhaps goes on top of your table saw. All rails and accessories for T-slots are here. All units for saw or router tables are here.
A rather hidden category that is becoming more and more full is the Scrapers; here we have collected all the products you use to scrape something off. Considering that it is called Scraper(s) in English, we think there is room for more products than just card scrapers ("sicklar") there. We now have Bahco's well-known scrapers with all the extra blades at home. When it comes to Bahco you hear and read that they now only sell China-made things, and that is really not true; most of the products we have are made in Sweden or in the EU. The saws are made in Sweden or Japan, the classic coping saw 301 is made in Germany, the hacksaw files are made in Portugal. But of course they also have production in China; apart from certain cheaper products, hammers, for example, are made there or in Italy. The scrapers above are made in Sweden and the blades are made in Luxembourg. We want you to know where products are made, so we have started to add which country the products we sell are made in, and will update this during the autumn as we get hold of the information. Veritas, among others, is now updated and you can see which country it is under each product, according to this picture.
In this example it says CA, which is Canada in the two-letter abbreviations that exist. China is, for example, CN, USA = US and Sweden = SE..
We sometimes get questions about our shipping prices, and I answered a customer about this a few days ago. I thought it might be interesting for the rest of you to read as well. We follow the price lists that are public on DHL and PostNord's websites (prices are excl. VAT). We are not a big player when it comes to shipping, so these are the prices we have to pay when we send your deliveries. DHL gives us a few percent discount through a group agreement, but PostNord invoices the same amount as in the price list. Our total shipping costs (in and out) are more than 10% of our turnover, which makes it hard to offer free shipping the way many others do. We have chosen to let loyal customers who buy a lot get an extra discount on shipping; otherwise we have chosen to let the customer pay what it costs to send the delivery, and instead have as low prices as possible on all the products; we believe and hope that you appreciate that. Personally I don't understand the concept of "free shipping", because it is a cost that someone somewhere has to pay, and what is the difference whether I go to a shop and buy (costs money in transport) or order online and have it sent to me (costs money in transport); it is the same thing. Sure, you can say that several items are shipped together and that makes it cheaper, but they have already made a trip in the other direction too, or several. Why should it then be free to my home? I would love a discussion about this; reply via our Facebook page. The big player A***on, I'd rather not say their name, since they have ruined the market for so many small business owners and which offers broad and wild free shipping from anywhere around the globe, has according to trade media begun to realise this doesn't hold in the long run; they will probably worsen the shipping, even for subscribers. And they will also worsen the terms for the "shops" that sell through them, so it will be even harder to be a shop inside their bubble. We usually say that we are grateful that a majority of our manufacturers have chosen to stand up to them and not sell there (or even forbid sales via these channels), but their products are copied wildly and sold at such low prices via, among others, them and other similar places that even the most seasoned buyer must react: how do you make this at such low prices? I understand that you want to save as much money as you can on your purchases, but somewhere there is a limit; in the end only cheap bad copies will be made, and that will really not benefit this industry. These are my personal opinions; I have chosen not to shop at these marketplaces, but it is up to each of you how you choose to do it. I do think, though, that these things need to be discussed now and then. I hope we will see each other at Gunnebo next weekend; come up and tell us you are a newsletter reader, and we will see whether we can have a little gift for you.
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