Kelauben,
Just a few points to make on your previous post about the value of woodpeckers products..
I recently had a few back and forth emails with Richard Hummel, president/owner of Woodpeckers (great guy by the way).
They only own one machine that will CNC large plate material to this accuracy and with the clamping methods needed to make it work, with these machines running in the ballpark of 200k, you begin to see where overhead adds up. Now take into account that the aluminum they are using is of an extremely high quality, there is a lot of waste per piece made and I'm sure it doesn't come cheap. The fact that woodpeckers holds such high quality standards and scraps any tool that fails their .001 accuracy test definetly adds to the cost but then again ensures that every tool that leaves their shop is dead accurate and you never have to think twice about trusting it. Add in employees and their associated costs, insurances, buildings, electricity, heat/ac.......... well u get the point, it all adds up
I'm sure these guys arent getting filthy rich off of their one time tools, rather are offering unique, useful, original tools at a reasonable price when all things are considered. The shipping charge is there so they can maintain what realistic markup they have on the tool which keeps their doors open
Remember these are small batch tools, which increases per piece costs and also takes away from them manufacturing other stock items they sell
Essentially they have the same policy as festool where they don't want one distributer to have an edge over another through lower pricing
Maybe what they should do is set up a fixed price on one time tools for dealers, that way if a dealer wanted to take a risk and order a large number of one time tools to keep as inventory they could do so, as long as they were sold as a minimum price
If woodpeckers included the cost of std. Shipping in the price of their tools would that be better? Probably not because if you buy more than one tool at a time from them, the included shipping price would work out to be more expensive than min tool price plus actual shipping
Woodpeckers is a great company that offers premium products which have a lot of value to woodworkers and others, I will continue to buy their products and thank them for what they do
John