Re: Help! Custom Leaning Post Gone Bad ...
 

I would give up trying to deal with this a##hole and look into the small claims court route. There's no reason you should be treated like that, and no reason he should be able to keep your money. I wonder how your email records of communications with him could be used as evidence.

rockdoc

Re: Help! Custom Leaning Post Gone Bad ...
 

I guess I'm glad I did not take this guy on as a sponsor on S-B [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] . He really did not meet the criteria anyway... I think he is or was a sponsor on THT a while back.

And THT is still influential in the northeast, not like what it is in the south but it is still the biggest boating site around that I am aware of...

Hope the problem is resolved..

Re: Help! Custom Leaning Post Gone Bad ...
 

I don't spend a lot of time on THT, but for a while this guy was posting left and right and seemed to have amassed quite a fan base. You don't see him on there anymore, so something must have gone wrong, especially in reading his email comments about the site that Mike M posted.

Re: Help! Custom Leaning Post Gone Bad ...
 

Arc-Tek built a post for me back in February. When I went down to see the operation and place my order, it looked like he was busy. There were a lot of boats in the yard, most for T tops. My simple 2 week project (taking one of his standard posts and scaling it down) actually took 4+ weeks. When I went to pick it up, he said he and his partner had a falling out right after they started my post, he was way behind and didn't see a way out of the backlog scenerio. It seemed to me that the partner was more the "worker", and Jim was more of the sales and marketing type. He also said (basically) that he hoped I was happy with the post 'cause he was not in a position to do anything with it if I was not!

All in all, the product he made for me is fine. There are a couple of welds that didn't get the best grinding job, and some of the tubing still had reference marks on it. No issues structurally, it has been used a lot this season and it has held up fine.

Re: Help! Custom Leaning Post Gone Bad ...
 

Hmmmmm....I am bit surprised about this situation. Jim seems like a very nice guy and while I know that some people have had structural problems with his t-tops, I also know that he was pretty prompt about fixing them.

With that said, let this be a lesson to everyone (myself included) that you're probably better off doing the following two things:
1) Dont rely on email. It is too difficult to judge a persons phone. Instead pick up the phone or meet with them face to face and resolve your differences.

2) Do business with a local company so that you can be involved in the project from the start until it is completed.

3) Remember the saying below. I gave my friend who owns a boat resto shop a copy of it to hang on the wall in his shop...

"The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten"