How is Mendel-parts still in business?

Hi Camiel,

I've sent you a PM, but probably your inbox here is also flooded, so you'll read it faster here.

I wanted to ask for an appointment next saturday 1 Oct related to my order # 100000714‏
and whether or not I could pay you by cash for the parts?
I'm from Belgium, so it's just an hour driving, but could you also PM me the exact address plz?

Grtz

hi MF,
i replied to your message, but i can reply here too.
like i said: no problem, also payment in cash is ok.

If someone else wants to come pick up things this Saturday thats possible too.
address is:
Gubbels Engineering
Hurksestraat 18 E
5652AK Eindhoven
Netherlands

But do send an email (or phone us) in coming days, so I know you are coming and can prepare things (if necessary) .
for help and pickup im here whole saturday from 10am, however you must phone us to enter (we have closed gate bit further away, so i dont see/hear you) during week gate is not closed, but in weekends it is.

I see I'm not the only one.

Camiel, I have finally found you (maybe). I tried contacting you on your contact form, followed by your forums, followed by hunting down your personal email to try to send you a message.

In short, I placed an order 3 weeks ago of only in-stock parts and it hasn't shipped yet. If you can't ship it to me, I suppose I'll understand, but I would like my money back if that is the case. (My email is george@nbitwonder.com, so shoot me a message there if you're still reading this thread).

Oh, and Camiel, if you are still reading this, I have the following suggestion:

Do NOT do any tech support over the phone, handle EVERYTHING in the Mendel-Parts forums.

Why? Because when you handle tech support over the phone, only one person can get help at a time, and many issues could potentially be resolved if we could just read over the tech support discussions and resolutions of others. If you insist on providing live support, at least do it through an IRC channel (the #reprap IRC channel or one of your own design).

This customer contact alone will help you significantly.

--George Hadley

Hi to everyone talking to Camiel on this thread.

I'm leaving the UK tomorrow to go work with him for a couple of weeks, to try and clear the backlog.

I will be monitoring this forum, and you can also e-mail me at james@jameshardiman.co.uk, and I will respond.

At the moment I am still in the UK, so I don't know what the situation is, but I will be there by Thursday lunchtime, Dutch time, and I, too, will work over the weekend.

George: I totally agree with you. I hope to be able to pick up documenting both Orca V.03 and V.03, and it will be hugely helpful to me, too, to have all tech problems answered in one place.

When I get to Eindhoven I will make sure that an Orca IRC channel is set up, and that we have a clear process for asking tech problems via forums.

I will make sure that all tech answers go in one place, so that they are clearly available.

James Hardiman
HAC-serg on #reprap

Thumbs up Camiel, for being back in business, and supporting customers and shipping orders! Keep it steady!

And the best wishes for James, who will help him out in Eindhoven! Don't say I didn't warn you for Camiel and his "lifestyle"! ;-)

I'll see if I get the chance to drop by this weekend, to meet you and Camiel, as I am working on the documentation for the Orca 0.2 as well.

Hugo

Looking forward to meeting you, Hugo!

James

Hi James,

yes please, documentation for the 0,2 would be great - after all - there seem to be a number of customers out there still staring at partly assembled bits.

... and in the hours you have spare ....
;-)

maybe you could throw up a Technical FAQ so that Camiel doesn't have to answer all those hundreds of mails whose answers can be found online.

Hello camiel or James

I was paying my order a week ago and I would like to know what going on with
My package I was trying to rich you A couple of time .
My order number is 100000780
My e mail is. Elidorz@yahoo.com

Thank you

Hi Camiel or James,

I'll be coming over next saturday to pick up My Order # 100000714‏, but is it still possible to tweak my order slightly?

I ordered the ' Alu printbed for Mendel - pre-drilled ' but I like to change this to the ' Alu printbed for Mendel - no cut-out '.

And one more question about the ' Set of 4 Heater blocks 4x 1.0 Ohm ' : What's the rated power from these resistors?

Grtz, Tim

Tim, I'm still on a cross-channel ferry, just approaching Dunkirk, so I don't know the answers to these questions ... but I'll be in Eindhoven in about 18 hours, and I'll start to find out!

James

Hi camiel

I do not understand you answering people
That are coming to pick up the goods

What about the other people from other country
That needs a delivery .

Thus no way for doing business that is bullshit

Just give me my money back I don't need to beg for
You to answer me .. The hell with it .

As a community people need to now their power
Any one that got a problem just go to resolution center
With paypal and open a case. Not only that you
Will get the money back thay will close his account
I promise .

God bless you James =)

Hi, everyone.

Well, here I am in Eindhoven, and I have already packed about 100 small bags with printer parts.

We are both working flat out to ship orders. I will do a summary later today, to let you know how we are doing.

Some people thought that it wasn't fair that I was going to get my order by coming here when they are still waiting.

Well, my order is dated 14 June, and we think that it's the oldest unshipped order, and we won't actually "ship"my order until I go home in 12 days time, so my being here is helping you all to jump past me in the queue!

I also intend to make a video that shows the advantages between the V.03 and the V.02 ... later!

James

James,

I'm going to go ahead and throw in there that Camiel absolutely SHOULD pay you for your troubles this weekend. If, because of your assistance with shipping, customers do not cancel thousands of dollars/euros/pounds in paypal disputes, Camiel should be forking over a considerable portion of this to you (history shows he would not have gotten to it himself in anything resembling a timely fashion).
And furthermore, I think this whole Mendel-Parts ordeal shows rather well that Camiel should NOT be leading Mendel-Parts. The fellow has all the markings of a Chief Technical Officer (CTO) -- he likes to develop. He should step down from the CEO slot and hand that to somebody who has a customer focus and is concerned about shipping, tech support, customer relations, etc. Honestly you've shown more concern and care in the last few days about everything than Camiel has throughout the length of most of the customer relationships on this thread, and would therefore make a better person to lead this whole operation.
If you're looking to get a printer, and you see the Orca, and then you see this thread about just how bad Mendel-Parts is, are you seriously going to buy a system that makes you 100% dependent on Mendel-Parts (particularly if led by Camiel)? Not if you're sane, you won't.

--George

Hi, George,

Thanks for your views. Having spent a day with Camiel I can confirm that´s he great guy, and a formidable engineer. His main problem was the same of very many small businesses with a successful product on their hands... he let orders expand too fast. He (we) are catching up. I think we shipped about 60 parcels today.

A tiny story... a supplier delivered today. One kilometer of threaded rod. So far Camiel has delivered 6 km of theaded rod to customers. Sure, recently he got badly behind, and made himself ill with stress. But we are catching up!

And he has had some complaints, but looking at his records he probably has about 80% customer satisfaction. Which is not good, but it´s recoverable.

Looking at his machines, I think they are well designed, and well made, and he´s constantly improving them.

There is a lot of anger from a few people on this form and on IRC (and they are justified). But what we don´t see are the comments from the customers who have successfully received around 2000 3D printers from Camiel. I´m sitting across from Camiel as I write this, and he just read out a complimentary email he just got from a very happy customer. I said that he should get permission to put those on a Testimonials page on his website, but the idea worried him.

I know that I would, if I were him!

Anyway, I have been here for a day, and I´m looking forward to the next week or so working together, and I´m looking forward to getting my machines home and built, and well documented.

One thing I don´t agree with Camiel... he thinks his manuals are wonderful. As a one time consultant to IBM on publications usability, I don´t agree. And I´m sure he´ll understand when I have re-written them, and he sees what a well-written manual should be like!

Anyway, folks, it's back to the grindstone; we have caught up on all small orders, and are now packing and shipping full machines. I will stick my neck out and say we should be caught up by the end of the coming weekend.

We are just about to "end of day" our UPS account for all the parcels we have shipped today, so quite a lot of you should get an e-mail from UPS very soon. If you don't get an email, don't worry; we're opening up a new day!

Tim: Saturday is fine, and the order change is fine.

The official power rating:

' Set of 4 Heater blocks 4x 1.0 Ohm ' : What's the rated power from these resistors?

Officially 15w each, but Camiel says he's never had one blow. There are higher rating ones, but they are physically bigger and don't fit under the bed.

See you Saturday,

James

Wow, I'm shocked by the outcry that I'm reading.

I'm not trying to excuse mendel-parts' slow response time, but do you guys think your helping with the constant pestering and complaints?

I have ordered from them (I just got their new V9 hot end kit) and was quite disappointed by the delivery time and the lack of published information such as e_steps_per_mm, but the quality was A+. In retrospect, I would order from them again in a heartbeat because even though it was weeks late, They are among the best quality in the community from what I've experienced.

I think everybody needs to chill out. If they spend all day answering technical e-mails (that could just as easily be answered through the forums) then they will get even less done.

Its no secret that they have slow delivery times, so don't order from them if your in a hurry! Otherwise, chill out

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/29/2011 05:09PM by bajasam96.

Thanks, [bajasam96]

Once we've cleared the backlog I'm going to see ehat I can do to recommend ways to improve customer service and delivery times; then we'll have all we need as customers.

James

Okay James, thanks!

In that case I'm thinking about putting 9 of them in a 3 by 3 matrix and feeding them with a 12V DC,
this would mean that there's 4V acros and 4 Amps going true each of them,
which makes 16W per resistor and a total power of 144W.

Shouldn't this be enough to reach 120°C for ABS, with a reasoable warmup time?

I did a small thermodynamic calc:

E = m * C * (T2-T1)

m = 0,5 kg
C(from Al) = 880 J/kg*K
dT = 100 K

E = 44 000 J

And E = P * t

t = warmup time (not taken into account the heat loss)

t = 44 000 J / 144 W = +/- 5 minutes

Grtz, Tim

Well now. I've been here since Thursday morning, and it's 21:00 Sunday evening, and I think I'm in a position to answer the question posed by this thread.

How is Mendel-Parts still in business? Well, why not? As I see it this company (this very tiny, one-man-and-his-very-small-dog company) provides one of the most complete services for people building 3D printers. The quality is excellent, and the amount of care and attention Camiel puts in is extraordinary.

OK, he's disorganised, and his delivery times have been dreadful. And his communication is bad: after 14 weeks I was ready to do something drastic, too. So I did. I came to help. And, I admit, I looked up the address of the Eindhoven police before I came, just in case.

Totally not necessary. Camiel is working his backside off to deliver what everyone wants. But some little time ago he accepted too many orders, and got swamped, and got himself ill, and that just made matters worse.

Well, since I got here I think we shipped about 70 orders. Tonight, before we go home (we generally get home around midnight or 1 am) we will have about another 20 boxes ready to go.

It would have been more, but a Chinese supplier let him down with a delivery of heater blocks. They will be here by Friday, but rather than wait, he has taught me to hand-craft them, and I'm covered with brass dust, but rather pleased with the 120 heater blocks I hand-made today.

So, if you get an order delivered in the near future, and notice that your heater block is hand-crafted, rather than mass-produced, hang on to it. It will probably be worth a fortune in years to come. ;o)

Why should you care? Because Camiel works as hard as anyone, and a lot harder than most, to make sure that you get products of the highest quality. He was just showing me some old Mendels that are currently printing plastic parts for some Mendel orders. He tipped one up so that I could see the NiChrome wire heated bed. "But I don't like doing that any more", he said, "because it can be dangerous for customers if anything happens to the insulation (and is there anyone who has worked with NiChrome who can say, hand on heart, they never cracked the insulation?)

That's why all printers from Mendel-Parts now have nice neat heating blocks that are easy to install, and much safer.

That's why his design for extruder hot ends is up to Version 9 ... because he's always working to improve them.

Why else? Well, a customer turned up at the door yesterday with his disabled son's 18-month-old Mendel that wasn't working. Camiel worked all day (and I do mean ALL day. Till after midnight) to find the problem and get it solved.

And the solution was to rip out the Gen 3 electronics and replace them with Gen 6.

And who was responsible for getting those designed?

Camiel isn't the easiest guy in the world to get along with. Occasionally I have to duck as something comes flying across the room!

But if you care about the Industrial Revolution 2.0, if you care about this new industry of ours, if you care about having a place where you can get more of what you want for your 3D printer than just about anywhere else, if you care about printers that really print, then help to support Mendel-Parts.

Don't order stuff and then raise a PayPal complaint if it isn't with you after 4 days (which happened this week).

My offer to you all is, if you can't manage to get a response from Camiel, e-mail me at James@JamesHardiman.co.uk, and I'll kick his backside.

Because I believe this company is worth our while keeping in business!

Want threaded rod? Compare Mendel-Parts prices on threaded rod with your nearest supplier. Which probably accounts for the fact that he's shipped more than six KILOMETERS of threaded rod!

Anyway. Rant over. We have boxes to pack.

James

There are many other venders that don't have this issue or at least are straight up with their customers.

Makerbot is straight up about their delay

Makergear is straight up about their delays

Bit's From Bytes was straight up about their delays.

I am sorry, If you take $1000 from a person you owe them transparency and honesty

If Camiel can’t deliver he has a very complicated and advanced tool he can use, don’t sell it till it’s in a freaking box.

Mendel-Parts is making “Industrial Revolution 2.0” look like a freaking joke, thanks!

---

repraplogphase.blogspot.com

spacexula Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

>don’t sell it till it’s in a freaking box.<


While I admire your efforts James, helping get Mendel-parts back on track, I do wonder what will happen when the week is over & you've gone home. Perhaps your main mission this week would be to encourage Camiel to implement spacexula's suggestion, as this would remove the largest source of complaints & upset from customers.

I understand he's swamped, but in his position I would have suspended all sales when I saw things were getting this bad, and communication with customers would have been number 1 priority.

Njones Wrote:
> I understand he's swamped, but in his position I
> would have suspended all sales when I saw things
> were getting this bad, and communication with
> customers would have been number 1 priority.

Point1 - suspend sales: I did just that, whole of august and most of September we didnt sell ANY complete kits and put things like hotends/motors/etc out of stock just for that purpose...

Point2 - communication: you are completly right, communication has/had to be priority 1... thats our biggest issue/mistake, I know. But we are busy improving that, but its not so easy as some people think/suggest.. Ive tried hiring extra people etc but that simply is not the solution Ive noticed..Lets say its bit more complicated, once you get over 100 emails a day.

However I dont mind that things get a bit more quiet here lately, we still get enough orders (and probably 40-60% from old customers that keep coming back). So these days I rather have few hundred customers that we can maintain (give proper support, be able to communicate fast enough etc) then thousands that we cannot maintain (at this time). But then again we are working on improving things, but (and everybody who ever ran a booming business probably knows) that doesnt change in a few weeks, Im busy with planning three months ahead and further in the future.

So my suggestion: If you are in rush, dont order at our webshop at the moment, but in 1-3 months things might be completly different, time will tell.

spacexula Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Mendel-Parts is making “Industrial Revolution
> 2.0” look like a freaking joke, thanks!


So developing popular things like Generation 6 electronics and a proper hotend (even before Makerbot with their 10million) and proper firmware is a freaking joke to you?

apparently marketing overrules proper quality products.. or you really dont know what you are talking about.

But well ok then, lets wait for our new touchscreen electronics then, developed by a small company that make the big ones look like a joke, but you probably find that a joke too...

So thanks for all the support guys, Im just wondering what all you did for the "Industrial Revolution 2.0" besides writing on forums/blogs..
Ive noticed that my happiest customers are never in the forums, they are just too busy with 3D printing...

And finally:
Its really simple, if things keep going on the negative side, we just stop selling parts and do like some other companies do, sell only complete machines and maybe filament and then you can only buy our new electronics or hotends with complete kits, makes my life alot easier.. and you can all go back to our competitors old stuff (but yes.. they do ship fast, so maybe that makes you happy..) I dont mind.. like I said, its makes it easier for me.

Dont forget Im doing this not for me (my social life ended a year ago).. but for the community,
Anyway I think we are in a discussion without an end.. so lets talk again in 3 months.
And then we hopefully have things on track OR only sell complete machines.. time will tell.

Camiel,

I can see that Orca v.03 is again for sale on your web-site.

Is this true?

If I order one now, can I be sure that I get it in one month?

thanks,
mihai

Hi Mihai,

yes thats true, well lets say if nothing really strange happens we should be able to ship that in 3weeks.
However to not dissapoint you, I would count for at least 4 weeks, and maybe keep one extra week in mind for strange things that happen.
So worst case maybe 5 weeks.

And if you have problems getting in contact with us via email, (we still have some delay on email, but by end of this week we should have catched up on that) try phoning us between 10am and 11pm. 0031 40 202 67 49 (UTC+01)

hope that answers your question.

regards,
Camiel Gubbels

To all

This guy camiel is a joke , he is not at all about open
Source and to help the community .
He is so poor and he feels sorry for him self
He ended is life for us ....owwwww
Please people here pretty smart , save us .
It all about money and business the guy know to
Take money and giving service .
I was opened a Case in paypal for refund .
After I have send him lots of e mail.
And his answer was that he want to help to
People that have time -- lots of time...
Dear people to fall for it you guys paying
Good money and want to get your stuff fast
And for a reason .... We want to print .
Pepole you have the money you makes the rules
If camiel don't ship after 6 to 8 day. Go for resolution
Center .
Thank you for reading .
From a guy that really are about the community .

All about money... what do i need money for? I work 20hours a day, 7 days a week, 30days a month for months in a row.
I dont even have time to spend money...
We reinvest it all in developments like new electronics (dont see many competitors doing all that).

But more importantly to all reading this:

Elidor is the person filing a claim after 5days.. while we have a 8 business days handling time.
So who's joking who here.

Paypal is very happy with us, we have had very low complain rates in july & august (around 1%), but ever since this thread started things changed again. Again, thanks for that.

And our paypal account will never be blocked (like some people think), we have often contact with paypal, but the only thing that happens if you complain often is that paypal holds 30% of all our income for 2 months, so we are unable to buy in stock properly.
So the complainers give the other patient customers delays, Elidor think about that if you say you are about the community.

And now im really getting tired of this thread, I have work to do.

FWIW, I ordered an Orca 0.30 a few weeks ago, and by mistake did the order twice. I sent a support email detailing the situation, but then saw the blog which said he preferred to get a phone call if it's important. I tried calling, and on the second attempt (the same day) he answered - I told him why I was calling and it was clear he had already read my email so was up to speed with it. It took all of a minute and he refunded me on the mistaken order, I chatted with him for a couple of minutes and that was that. It's important to point out that this was before James went to help out, so to me this illustrates that he is trying to get things under control and was doing it on his own - and now with the assistance of James he can get things headed in the right direction even sooner. Site note, gotta love it when your customers come and help you ship products, big props to James!

I say this just to make this point - if what you want is more communications and transparency from someone, and they start exhibiting that behavior, and then you start attacking them for not being transparent or communicative in the past, there's a good chance that they're not going to pursue it in the future. I can totally see why people would be bent, if someone promised me something in a couple weeks and it took multiple months, I certainly wouldn't be a happy camper. My belief is that James assessment is right on - his passion and hobby became a business, and the transition is a painful one. Who knows, I might be posting on here in a few months going "WHERE'S MY ORCA!!", but I'm an optimist, and I believe it's more likely I'll be printing with it.

I think it's easy from the outside to say "why don't you do this" or "I would do that", but in my experience it's rarely that obvious in the maelstrom of unexpected success.