Goodbye Craig

Autumn of 1998, that was me in the left pic there, or rather my first pipe exhibition.  I'd just won the P&T carving contest and lots of people were mailing and emailing and even phoning (It was the Jurassic era, after all...) wanting to see and/or buy my work.  I scrambled like crazy to get some stuff ready for the CORPS show that year but it was too late to register a table and my little handful of pipes wasn't enough for a full table spread anyway.  While I was trying to figure out what to do, Craig Tarler contacted me and told me to bring whatever I could and they'd make room for me on the C&D table.  He barely even knew me at the time, but was perfectly happy to help out a new carver, and as everyone knows there is no better exposure at any pipe show than to have work on the C&D table spread, because 150% of the floor traffic is guaranteed to come your way.

So, we sat, we talked, and we got to know Craig and Patty.  Patty even bought some earrings from my wife, if I recall correctly.  They were wonderful people to know.  When I think back on how I got started, I credit my early success primarily to just a few big helpers - Paul Perri for teaching me how to make pipes, Mark Tinsky for answering a lot of other pipemaking questions back in the days before there were any internet tutorials for this stuff, and Craig and Patty for helping me out with the early exposure that got my work known.  I feel like I owe pretty much all my success today to these folks.  I could say a lot of high praise about Craig because he was a genuinely good guy, but I'll sum it up really simple.

Craig, we'll miss you.

The Deadly Trap of Pipe Repair

<-- Howard the Duck lays out the life of the pipe repairman today.

Pipe repair!  If there was ever a business in demand, this is it.  Everyone wants to find a good pipe repair guy who can do great work at decent rates, and I write this because just recently I've had several people in a row ask me if I did pipe repair.  My answer, alas, is no - I only do pipe repair in the form of warranty repair work on my own pipes, not on anyone else's.  Most other pipemakers will tell you the same.

Why is this?  If there is so much demand, why are there hardly any people in the business?  Mark Tinsky may still do repairs, I'm not sure, and there used to be a highly respected retired gentleman in California who did them but I haven't heard of him in years.  Precision Pipe Repair made a big splash a couple of years ago but their website hasn't been updated since last summer.  What gives?  Is there a conspiracy to keep poor collectors from being able to have their cherished collectibles fixed up?

Whenever I talk with new pipe carvers and they ask about doing repair work, I always urge them not to - In the words of that Star Wars character:

My own experience is that it's very difficult to satisfy the customers and virtually impossible to make a living wage at it - That's why so many pipe repair guys are retirees, people with social security and pension income who just want something to do on the side, but don't have to rely on it for their groceries.  The problem, in a nutshell, is an unworkable set of customer expectations:

• They expect their cherished pipes to return like-new, no matter how complex the job.
• They expect speedy service.
• They expect this to all cost around $35.  Maybe $50 if it sounds really complicated.

Pipe repair tends to really bring out the magnifier and protractor set, who examine their returned pipes under the loupe and loudly curse about the skills of the repair guy if any small fault is found, despite the low dollars they're expecting and willing to pay for the work.  It simply isn't financially feasible.  Hell, I'd do it if I could do it profitably, but the reality is that...  Well, let's take a recent example.  

Someone bought a new pipe and asked if I could include a second handcut stem with it.  It was an easy stem to replicate, thankfully, and a rare case where two stems could be workably interchanged on one pipe, so I quoted around $100 for the job and ended up making the stem.  I debated about this because my initial reservation is always, "Yikes, I'm going to get yelled at if I tell someone a stem will cost $100, but if I price it at less I'll make zip and hate the job in the process."  And I know a lot of people wanting pipe repair would absolutely fall down dead if they got a more-typical $150+ stem replacement bill, but the thing is, I could make and sell at least one or maybe two Ligne Bretagnes in the time it would take me to do a single handcut stem and fit it seamlessly to a repair pipe.  That's $200-$300 of income for the same amount of working hours that the repair customer is expecting to pay *maybe* $50 for.  The math just isn't there.

How could this be made to work?  Mostly, it would take a substantial attitude adjustment on the part of the customers, who would have to realize that service fees for pipe repair are going to be on par with what they pay for other skilled service labor - Try getting an auto tech to do 3 hours of work on your car for $50.  It isn't happening.  I realize that a lot of times, the pipes they want repaired only cost them $75 new, and that's the other crux of the problem - It costs more in labor time for an independent craftsman to make a new, matching stem than it ever did for the factory to turn out the entire original pipe on an assembly line.  I can understand the sentimental drive behind the guy who's willing to pay $100 to have his nostalgic favorite Peterson fixed up, but I don't want to be yelled at (as has often happened) by the guy who reacts, "WHAT?  You want HOW MUCH to replace that stem with a handcut one and refinish the whole pipe?  Why, I only paid $65 for the whole thing when it was new!"  

Yes, sir, I know, but them's the realities of economic time scales...

In closing, do any of my readers know of current pipe repairmen?  I'd like to have some good names that I can send people to when they ask me if I do pipe repair.  For my part, though, it just isn't happening.  I regard setting up shop in pipe repair as a death trap, with way too much demand and way too little willingness to pay the labor costs of the job.  If you want to work 80 hours a week for below minimum wage, though, what a career opportunity...!

In need of a Web Boffin

Having just put together another website update, and spent some time updating our shipping fees as well, I've been looking into one other issue that I'd love to fix if possible. Paypal's payment buttons currently don't have any way of automatically marking an item sold on our site, so I have to mark each item manually. This is working time that I would love to not have to waste doing this, because it's a pain (Open Photoshop, find catalog item pic, add "Sold" text, run outline action, save, open Dreamweaver, upload pic to site, open item page, mark "Sold" in text, remove payment button... for every single item that sells...), and also it would be handier for buyers if items could be immediately auto-marked as Sold upon purchase.  What happens sometimes is that I'll post an update, then get back to work in the shop, and several people will all try to buy the same thing before I come back to the computer to see it's been sold and mark it accordingly.

From what I can (vaguely) comprehend from Paypal's tech help, the Paypal buttons can be set up to send some sort of acknowledgement to a script on your own page, which can include code to update a site database accordingly.  Now, everything in the latter half of that previous sentence may as well be Russian to me as I know nothing about scripting for sites or site databases.  So my question is, does anyone know of a good tutorial or system which could accomplish this auto-marking of sold items for me?  If it's not horrendously complex I could probably figure it out for myself if there are any plain English explanations available, and obviously it would be desirable to be able to fully understand and operate the system on my own.

My limitations are those of most one-man businesses - I don't have the time to take off a week for learning all about site databases, nor the money to pay a site guru.  Though I would be amenable to some sort of pipe trade if anyone was able to provide some help explaining and/or setting something like this up.  I know there are some shopping cart systems that do this, but those all cost money every month and that's something else I want to avoid - I like using the Paypal buttons because they're free and only pay to PP for items that sell, rather than hitting me with a $50/month bill AND credit card processing fees.  If anyone has any ideas or solutions for this issue, please give me a buzz or leave a comment.