You may have noticed that one of my interests is "Woodworking". I am over 70 years old and I can recall hammering my first nail at about age 4, so that covers a lot of time. I now specialize in fancy inlay woodworking and show at craft and art shows around the country. I have never had a dissatisfied customer and that brings me to the point of this blog.
I have several major pieces of equipment that I purchased from Grizzly and all were very high quality. That was until I purchased a double drum sander. As it turned out the bed under the belt was made of particle board. I had another drum sander at the time and the bed under that one was made of stainless steel. It was only a single drum and I wanted a bigger double drum unit. That was when I ordered the Grizzly unit. I ordered a 2hp dust collector system at the same time to go with the drum sander. I got the whole works put together and set up for my test run. What I found was that the drums turned the wrong way and sent the dust out on top of the work pieces so that the dust collector could not pick up the dust. It seemed that in the design, someone forgot that you not only need vacuum volume, but you also meed air velocity. The baffling inside was so poorly designed that most of the air was lost or came in from wide open spaces such that the air velocity was so low that the dust settled by gravity on the work pieces rather than being picked up. I made a list of area where the design could be improved and shared that with Grizzly, but they did not from the start seem to want my help or input. As you know I am an engineer and a PE as well as a former University Instructor, so I do know a little about fluids and machine design.
The final thing that I found was that the unit was rated for 16", but the exposed sanding drum width was only about 15". This was because they used packaging tape on each end of the sanding drum to hold on the sand paper. I expected that if the machine was rated at 16" then you should be able to sand a piece that was 16" wide. Not the case and I think that Grizzly must have known this before they made the claim. This point did not stop me. I looked at the design and determined that if they were to use "transfer" tape on the ends of the drum under the sandpaper that they could reduce the amount of over taping on the outside. This would increase the exposed sandpaper on the drum to about 16" or close to their spec. How their design worked, the packaging tape had to extend past the end of the sandpaper so that it would pick up the exposed drum. With their design, the sandpaper would slip on the drum if the tape did not extend past the edge of the sand paper. I think that you can follow this point. With my proposed design change, the "transfer" tape under the sand paper would keep the sand paper from slipping and the narrow tape on the sand paper would provide the normal force to hold the sand paper tight against the "transfer" tape that was on the drum. I also provided Grizzly my source for this "transfer" tape and asked the tape manufacturer to contact Grizzly directly. I don't know what more a customer could have done to help Grizzly.
With all of my ideas, the machine still had some serious flaws, like the particle board under the moving belt. With hold down rolls fixed in one position, after a very short time the belt would cut a divot into the particle board. That is why my old unit had a stainless steel surface under the belt. I suggested that they could try some high pressure laminate on top of the particle board to reduce wear and friction, but Grizzly was not impressed.
The final straw was the fact that the two rolls turned in the same direction, throwing all the dust down stream and making it difficult to pick up. I had a revision for this point too, but they still were not impressed. As you can see by this point, I had tried my best to get the unit working. It would have seemed natural for the two drums to turn toward each other so that dust would accumulate between the rolls where it would be much easier to vacuum up. With the dust in a well defined area, the air velocity could be much higher and thus preventing any dust from getting into dead air areas. See, I was trying to help.
It looked to me like the best thing to do was to send the unit back to Grizzly. My position was that I was not the problem, I was just the customer who relied on their claims. I demanded that they take the unit back and give me full credit plus also pay for the shipping back. All I asked was that they "make me whole" since I was not at fault for anything. I think that getting them to pay to ship the unit back got under their skin and because of that, Grizzly put me on their "Black Balled" list. To this day, they still send me catalogs and when ever I try to order something, I get a note back that my order has been canceled. It looks to me like someone at Grizzly has far too much time on their hands to be working so hard "not" to process my orders. I have since gone to their fine store in Springfield, Mo and purchase tools without any problem, but I can't order them out of the catalog. Figure that one?
How is this one? I just had a casting break in my 10" Grizzly table saw that I purchased back in 2004. I looked up the part on the Grizzly web site and ordered it. I got the normal order conformation and then about a hour later, I go another e-mail that my order was canceled and that if I wanted to know why, I needed to call head quarters in Washington. I called and it took a few minutes to get back to me, but the answer was still the same. I was still on the "Black Ball" list. Now I ask you, what is a guy to do about his Grizzly 10" table saw if Grizzly refuses to honor your order for a needed spare part? This seems to me like a major departure from the very high quality way that the Grizzly organization has dealt with their customers up to this point. This really seems like strange behavior to me. How about you?
