Thanks for the update. It’s a pain for you, but no stress here. Let us know when you hear back. Good luck, hope they fix it easily for your sake. :+1:
At worst would it be easy enough,would it work to glue dowels into one half that would fit into the holes in the other half?
Yea that is an option. But there is only one peg per half. I’m kinda annoyed they ignored my email.
I would be very annoyed as well. And remember that in future. How short sighted of them.
Well after a week of 2 ignored emails and 1 phone call not answered or returned, today’s (second) phone call was answered and the lady said they will send replacements and a pre-paid shipping label to return the old ones. If they had been helpful and friendly last week I would have probably made due with them. But now they annoyed me so I’m all for them paying return shipping. It seems the new ones will not wait for the old ones to return.
The broken off pegs were not in the boxes, so they should have known before they shipped.
Sorry for the delay guys.
Beyond your control Joshk, thanks for sorting it out. :+1:
DO you know if they are sending the old-style or just the same ones with the single peg?
She said she “didn’t know” but I didn’t believe her… Which means it will for sure be the same ones.
Well the replacements all arrived without alignment pins. They weren’t even in the boxes. I decided to build with them, but the lady I talked to to get them said if they arrived damaged again they would refund us. So I sent blick an email monday, which they ignored again. Finally yesterday before 5 I called them, and once again they acknowledged getting and reading the email, but not replying. WTF. She said they ‘couldn’t reply’. Which is exactly what they said about the last time they ignored my emails. Once again I understood this to be they were blaming technical issues, but it’s an odd way to say it. And I always check my spam folder when someone fails to answer an email.
Then it occurred to me this could be some management scheme. That’s a pretty big assumption, but I checked my sent email. When I had an issue with my order, I replied to the order confirmation. I always do this because it has all the relevant information inside. However, the email address it replies to is orders@dickblick.com Which IS monitored by people. But apparentally those people are ACCOUNTANTS that are not allowed to handle customer service. And they do not forward the email to customer service. Nor does anybody tell you that your email is being ignored. There is another email address called custservice@dickblick.com. I assume God forgot to tell me this is the only email that goes to a person with the authority to talk to a customer. It’s a pretty cold-hearted way to hope your customer issues just go away on their own. After poking around on their website, I confirmed this whole two-email-address assumption to be true. Sad. So by phone they agreed to refund us since they are unable to provide undamaged spheres.
Aarrg!
Yea. But the good new is I am finally free to slice and dice the spheres. I have been working for hours trying to get a good camera setup to capture this. It’s a rather large area though. My iPhone doesn’t like the lighting ideas I had. I will figure something out.
After a weekend going to and from the home improvement stores in town I got a lighting setup I like and got started. I have about half the recording done on the building, then I need to record how I made the tooling. The new goal is to finish by this weekend with the recording and rough editing. It’s more burdensome that expected to have to have every action framed in the camera, focused, and recorded as I work. But it’s fun too. I have been thinking for some time about a DIY youTube channel. This will be a good experience toward that goal.
:+1: Yep, a world of difference between just doing it and documenting with film/video.
Making youtube videos is not as easy as it seems 
Yea it’s a huge commitment. Honestly, I have not done it yet because I have noticed even the best made videos on youTube rack up significant number of hateful comments and thumbs-down. It’s very discouraging and has kept me out of the hobby for years.
It really depend on the audience. I don’t have an issue, dislikes and likes count the same so it really doesn’t matter, and I just remove bad comments or blacklist common offensive words.
People who post mean comments repeatedly just get banned, and I’ve only had to do that like less than 5 times.
The trick is to ignore most of the negativity, and try to build a positive audience
Negative people leave quickly (even more quickly if you ban them) but positive people stick around because they like the work you do.
Ha, I didn’t know dislikes and likes counted the same. But that goes to show youTube can’t deny the issues. It’s encouraging to know you are running a channel and seem to like it.
Yeah, it’s great for teaching people and just showing stuff you enjoy. Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to record stuff lately because of university, but everything’s going alright
Well the taping this weekend went ok. It was very awkward not having spheres that would lock together. I am doing a take2 today, right now I am running the printer for the extra adapter sizes at the moment. I will have to check for duplicates when the printer finishes, but I think this print job brings the total per sphere to 9 adapters instead of the original 3.