- RGW acquired and relocated to a new 1800 s/f shop facility in late May. this came about very unexpectedly, but when an opportunity like this comes along you either get cold feet or jump in with everything - we did the latter. this had a short-term impact on production, as the shop needed to be closed up, packed up, relocated, and unpacked. all but three orders made the final cut-off before things were boxed up, and those orders have since been completed and delivered clearing all outstanding orders placed before Feb 2013
- a couple days after loading all of the shop equipment, tools, wood, hardware, and parts into the new facility my wife took a head-over-heels tumble down a flight of stairs and face planted at the bottom while she was loading in to a painting session. she was about 5 seconds behind me and fell carrying her first load in (I made it down the stairs without incident), and based on the ER report it's no small miracle that she's not fully paralyzed (her chin left a nasty bruise on the top of her shoulder, and was pinned there by her body trying to slide to the bottom of the stair landing) This caused a full stop on just about everything for the following 6 weeks as she was unable to get on/off the couch/facilities without direct lifted assistance. There's still a long road ahead to full recovery - BUT she's also not confined to a wheelchair (or worse) the remain days of her life.
- in July the shop began getting setup again during when I had a bit of time to squeeze out from caretaker duties. we're setup enough to resume production, and will study workflows in the greatly expanded facility to discover how we can optimize tooling placement to better facilitate a streamlined flow without unnecessary travel between workstations
- initial reservations have been booked for NAMM 2014 in January. we'll have an expanded booth with new bass offerings and a greatly expanded selection of guitar offerings. sadly, we'll also be reducing our lefty content due to a lack of interest. with the exception of one or two people, the only booth visitors with interest in lefty basses came from those here on LB who found way into the show. it hurts to have to make this decision to reduce the lefty content, but I need to allocate the limited booth space to where we receive interest.
we will continue to offer all of our models in a lefty configuration and (with rare exception) at the same pricing as righty instruments. the pricing exception is for cases where a lefty part is made for us by custom order (as in only righty parts are available on the market) and has a significantly higher wholesale price than what can be had with standard parts.
time to get back out to the shop and get those NAMM instruments cranked out. catch you in Anaheim in Jan if we don't connect before then
all the best,
R
