Hi everyone,
It appears that it was my post that got Tim so upset so I am here to make things right and move on. Tim I am very sorry that things I said were interpreted as digs or attacks on your integrity or your ability. I am not a jerk. I am not an idiot. I do not call people names. I do not make personal attacks on people in forums. I do sometimes try to make a point with colorful language or phrase things with sarcasm and that doesn’t always go well in a text only conversation, so my bad for those cases. If you read no further know that my intentions were good even if some of my words were bad. I consider you the best vendor that I have ever dealt with and I see dozens of people on the forums that think the same way. Although my judgement may have been wrong on posting what I did, my intention was to help others that had the kit and help prevent Tim from having to replace more than just the tailcones if people proceeded with assembly before hearing about the slot issue.
Tim, I am particularly stunned by your response as I have been your loyal customer since your days in the basement of Al’s Hobbies, more than 10 years ago. In those days I bought dozens of kits and hundreds of parts from you while getting into mid and a little high power rocketry for a few years before being diagnosed with a life threatening illness that lead to 20 hospital stays and 4 surgeries over the next 5 years and obviously put an end to expensive and time consuming hobbies like rocketry. After being back on my feet for a couple years now, I really missed rocketry and was happy to see that the hobby was surviving and that the Wildman was thriving and innovating and was one of the top vendors in the country. Local boy made good! So last year I started to study the new techniques and buy some of these new (to me) all FG kits and of course I brought you my business and even convinced my wife and 2 kids to go to MWP12 and launch a couple rockets. I’ve always treated you with respect, followed your advice and thought of you as someone who I would like to get to know better as I get more time and money to come to launches and fly more rockets. I admire your tireless efforts to innovate with things like thin wall FG, Head End Deployment, custom motor retention included in kits and many more things I haven’t discovered yet.
So now some background on the post that I wish I had never sent. Being a novice around here I come to TRF to learn, learn, and learn and whenever a topic that I know something about comes up, to help others. Something I know a bit about is Rocksim, I actually passed the time in the hospital by designing and building crazy rockets in Rocksim and playing games with my son where we would compete building virtual rockets to see who could make the coolest looking, highest performing, most complicated etcetera.
And then last week 2 things happened. I got my Black Saturday Sale order including the Punisher, the Saab, and the V2 2.6 and started looking for build threads on TRF. I found Willie’s thread where he was asking for some help working out the CG and CP of the V2 2.6, because he only had Open Rocket and OR can’t handle accurately simulating fins on curved boattails. No problem for Rocksim so I volunteered to help by putting together a V2 2.6 file. So a couple days later I got the kids in bed by 9:30 and jumped on the computer to build the V2 2.6 Rocksim file, and started by weighing all of the kit parts one by one and worked on the file for a while. After posting the results for Willie I was admiring the kit again and tried sliding a couple fins into the tailcone slots and thought ‘Crap, these slots are a few degrees off’. My first thought was I just got a bad part, it happens, and I’ve got nothing to worry about, I know Tim will make it right because I’ve been buying kits and parts from him for 10 years and have never had a problem with his quality or his customer service. I looked at the clock, it was after 11pm and there is no way I’m gonna call a vendor at 11pm to let them know I got a bad part, I’ll give him a call in the next day or two and he will send me a new tailcone and he will probably appreciate finding out about it so he can double check his tooling before fabricating any more parts. It never crossed my mind to post anything on TRF because I thought there was one bad tailcone, I was the guy who happened to get it, and there was no reason to talk to anybody but Tim about it.
And then I saw Willies posts. He was posting in the V2 Sport build thread, an honest mistake, no big deal to me, but he was talking about the bad fin slots and posting picture after picture, showing it from every angle, looking for some affirmation that he wasn’t crazy, with a ‘are these slots really that far off?’ kind of tone.(All of his posts about this have since been deleted, but they were there for days and they are what I responded to) So now my mindset changed from ‘I’m the only one that got a bad tailcone’ to ‘someone else got the exact same bad tailcone as I did so there might have been a problem with all the slots cut in this initial run of kits. I felt like I had some valuable info to add to the discussion, and maybe I should post, but I still felt kind of uneasy about posting before talking to Tim. But it was the middle of the night and I couldn’t talk to Tim first, but I could maybe prevent someone else from starting to assemble their kit.
So Willie’s posts about the slots had been sitting there in the wrong thread for a few days, no one had criticized him for posting about a problem in a kit, no one had told him he was in the wrong thread, Tim had not posted anything to try to explain or warn others about the situation, and no one else had posted that they also had bad slots in the V2 2.6 kit. Willie had posted that Tim responded quickly in sending him a new tailcone, and others had posted saying that Tim was always great about taking care of problems. But it still was looking like an isolated incident, that Willie had gotten the only bad tailcone, and that is when I decided I should post to let everyone know that I got the exact same bad slots as Willie, so the problem was potentially in all of the initial run of kits, so if I posted I might prompt others to check their slots before starting assembly to try to prevent people needing more than the tailcones replaced. If others started assembly, then the motor mount, the centering ring, the motor retainer, and the 4 fins would all need to be replaced if they had been epoxied together before noticing the bad slots. I could actually be helping Tim if I posted about this being a widespread issue, and because I really like Tim I wanted to do that.
Now the only place it would make sense for me to post about this is in the same wrong place that Willie had posted because I was responding directly to him about the specific issue he was talking about. I always find it frustrating when someone posts in some new thread and refers to comments made in some other thread because it is confusing to try to go find the other thread and follow a conversation. To me my post would only help others be being a direct response to Willie’s posts about the slots. After all it’s the moderators job to move posts that are in the wrong thread, I don’t have the power to move posts so this is where I have to post to make it a response to Willie’s posts about his slots. And his posts had been there for days without anyone saying they should be moved or any mods moving them.
So I posted. I mentioned my confidence that Tim would make it right, just like everyone else had. I mentioned that I knew that cutting slots in curved boat tails was extremely hard to get perfect as a way of saying ‘we get it man, we understand that you were a little off in one of the hardest cuts there is’, the problem wasn’t that you made some bad cuts, it was that you didn’t notice the bad cuts before the kits got sent out. When I said that I had successfully made cuts like this I wasn’t trying to say I did better work than Tim (duh!), I was trying to show some understanding and compassion for how hard it was and I really should have mentioned the 5 or 6 tailcones that I had ruined while learning how to do it. Since I am the novice and Tim is the professional it never occurred to me that this comment would sound like a dig at Tim, that was not my intention and I am sorry for phrasing it the way I did.
And finally, I want to thank those that have supported me by saying that they didn’t see any problem in my post and that they saw I hadn’t started the topic, and that I was trying to add valuable info to the discussion.
Now I'm going to get back to spending my time here talking about building rockets, talking about flying rockets, helping each other out with build threads, tips, sims, and advice and enjoying our common interests. See ya in the forum.
Still no result.
