Do Not Order Online From Teknatool

These Kiwis may make great chucks, but the ecomm part and the user management side of their site is FUBAR.

Placed an order for grinding jig. Got to an order conf page and printed it out. No email conf. So far, no charge to card but info is now floating out there.

Call to US rep leads to realization that they have stranded him with no product until Feb and no way to help me out with the site/order issue other than trying to use their broken ticketing system. Been waiting weeks for some kind of response.

Order from Amazon or only buy product in hand.

Bodum Love, VW Hate

In a time where most manufacturers are scrambling to make everything plastic rather than metal, Bodum is undoing past sins of a shortcutting nature.

A french press I have had for a few years had a plastic part wear out. The press part would blow up during the actual pressing, requiring pulling the thing apart and messing with rethreading the thing back together – handling boiling hot beans and always seemingly on my crabbiest mornings.

Occurred to me about a year into this thread failure situation to check if they sold replacement parts. Turns out they do. They even mention the failure my press was having in their FAQ, but the part is not listed in their catalog. It’s not listed because if you call them, they send you a new one for free.  Free.

Stainless steel rather than plastic. All their new presses use a stainless “shoulder nut”, as they call it.

So here you go Bodum! A very pleased and impressed customer doing P.R. for you.

All you other bastard companies take note, including you V.W. for making the engine block coolant flange out of plastic.

F you VW, while we are at it. Never ever buy a VW! Cannot lock my doors because the alarm goes off randomly and the security system is not on its own circuit so there is no good way to shut it off. Also, just had to replace the wiper switch (the wiper motor was several years ago) and the cruise switch bit it years ago as well. COMPLETE RUBBISH this car. The engine lasting 200000+ doesn’t matter if all the supporting systems fail – stuff that should never break!

Seals No Thing, Magic Tub & Wall

Kicking off the DON”T BUY THIS EVER category of new product review section.

There are some things that are so awful they inspire me to proselytize:

Seals NOTHING

Seals NOTHING

Now, I normally do things right.  Where caulk is called for, I caulk away.

In this circumstance I had a large gap in the corners of my basement laundry area.  The contractor who put the mostly waterproof panels on the wall didn’t make sure the corners were tight.  Would have required a 1.5″ bead of caulk.  So this product seemed like it was going to come to the rescue.  Hell, if it could be used in a bathroom tub it should be able to handle the once in a while moisture of the laundry area.

WRONG!

After careful installation, the strips pulled away from the corners and left a nasty bad awful trail of thick adhesive.  So the adhesive stuck just fine to my surface, but not to the product itself!

At least two hours of my life were lost trying to carefully scrape away the adhesive with a razor blade.  As I would slice the adhesive off, it would flop back onto the surface and require a whole new round of slicing.  Pulled off the wall, the stuff could be rolled around on your fingers, sucking all the oil and moisture from them but wouldn’t lose any amount of its stickiness!

So despite infinite amounts of sticking power, the products fails on itself.