The last ones arriving on people's doorsteps, or in their mailboxes these days.

[six-point socket II]

This is my personal farewell to the Festool printed catalogs.

[attachimg=1]

[attachimg=2]

Personally, I do understand citing environmental impact as reason for not longer offering printed catalogs. And I do understand the time has come for this habit to obviously die. But I think it's a mistake. Maybe not for Festool, as their main product and accessory line is not that hard to keep track of/ stay informed on - but a lot of great catalogs have vanished over the last couple of years.

Additionally I'm pretty sure that the amount of printed catalogs and postage for them did not any longer have a healthy ratio when compared to sales attributed to them.

Personally, I still love to have paper catalogs in the workshop for quick research, but: The Times They Are a-Changin'. So farewell Festool catalog!

Kind regards,
Oliver

 

[Crazyraceguy]

Really? Well just one more thing "killed" by the internet.
I got a fresh copy of the US version, late last year. It was my first for several years. I think the last one I had was a 2016 vintage.
Agreed, sometimes it's just nice to have the paper one in your hands.

 

[Michael Kellough]

Back in the ‘80’s, before computers took over, I did special effects (mechanical style) for films and commercials. To my cohorts and me the McMaster-Carr book was “the Mother of all catalogs”.

Printed on bible paper with three times as many pages it allowed us to search for and order those parts we knew we needed and things we didn’t know existed but might solve a problem. It was certainly the most important tool we had. So important that guys argued over who would inherit last year’s edition when someone managed to get a new copy. For several years the catalogs were hard to get hold of. Fortunately the part numbers remained the same so a five year old catalog was still useful.

There were other specialty catalogs we used but it took days to get stuff from them. McMaster has a distribution center near enough to Manhattan that we could place an order over the phone (with a very efficient rep.) at 6pm and receive the stuff about 18 hours later.

Computers kept getting better and cheaper and when the touch up guys said they’d prefer we suspended models from something easier for them to see on the film like thick orange string instead of tungsten wire- the work lost it’s attraction. I went back to doing fine art projects and rarely needed McMaster.

Still have a McMaster catalog somewhere but the web site and the app are so outstanding I haven’t bothered to look for it in over a decade.

 

[frankom]

I was in a Woodcraft store this yesterday and they had an open box of Festool catalogues.  You may have to ask for them as they are sometimes in a storage area
with several other brands catalogues.

 

[woodferret]

Aw, I hope they don't drop the electronic version after this too.  The accessories tables were very helpful.  They're designed by a librarian/technician, while the web version was designed by someone with ADHD.