Tom, the bragging rights for the longest post is hereby awarded with citations added for excellent content.
I’ve been doing this for only six years, certified, messing around with bootleg product a little longer. Your post certainly cleared up some questions I’ve had in my mind and the part about manufactures listening only when forced to is probally true and probally human nature.
The long warantee certainly isn’t without precedent, look to swanstone for an even longer one, even cars are getting 100,000 mile warantees now a day, craftsmen hand tools, ect. Your experience as a repair agent certainly gives a lot of weight to your arguments. I have been sent out on four repair jobs, the first one was a bad sink so no fault, Avonite paid for that one, the second was a bad fabricator (can you imagine gluing on a build up without removing any of the plastic film that comes on the sheet?) and our distributor made the fabricators company pay us for doing the work and didn’t send it thru avonite, the other two for for a very inexpensive import brand and we set one requirment for doing them, pull the fabricators certification before we went out to actually fix it. They were that bad. Oh, and a couple of those “courtesy resands” that I did just for the benefit of our former distributor who I owe big time.
The thing about the long warrantee is it helps me justify selling someone a ten thousand dollar counter top job. We have done several and have a fourteen thousand dollar job coming up. If you read my rant about our frustrations with avonite, you will recall that they shook that confidence and lost some business as a result.
Your comments about the warrantee sheilding bad fabricators makes sense if 40 percent of the claims were rejected for valid reason and they were warrantee’d anyway. I’ve allways told people that solid surface scares the bejesus out of me when I am working it, that ten year warrantee that I have to cover if it isn’t done right. I guess in reality, the guys that slop out the most sheet good win in the short turn. Maybe the manufactures ought to have to make public who is having the most claims against them, or just let it slip out so we can spread the word.
I was out on a job the other day, huge one for poor oklahoma. About sixty grand in the kitchen, libray and master bath of a house. The designer went with Jetta for the laundry room top, a four x ten L and a v shaped smaller top. No build up, no seam blocks, just glue stalagmites hanging off the seam, visible seams. Now, I am on great terms with both the builder and the designer, already getting refferals for more work before we are even done. It would be suicide to point out the defects, yet I get undercutt by companies that do this crap work. And they get the materials cheaper. Proving your point that whoever sells the most sheets wins.
Don’t be too humble yourself, sharing this info will help a bunch of us pick the right road in this trade.
Thanks for the response, AL.