• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Cliffies at Ax

Woodbloke

Woodbloke

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I see after a hiatus of severial years, Ax have (in their wisdom) decided to re-introduce Clifton planes to their line up. They used to sell the range some years ago and then for some odd reason best known to themselves, decided to stop which I never quite understood. C'est la guerre :lol:

Interestingly, they don't appear to have a single hand plane in stock! (or didn't last time I looked) - Rob
 
Woodbloke":18g1bivi said:
.....Interestingly, they don't appear to have a single hand plane in stock! (or didn't last time I looked) - Rob
Click to expand...

What an extraordinary position for the country's leading woodworking tool and machinery supplier to find itself in. Extraordinary.
 
Strange days indeed.

Axminster were, in my opinion, a benchmark of a decent range of quality kit for what you wanted, decent advice - they knew what they sold and most importantly, fixing quickly what went rarely wrong.

Mind you, I was a customer since the very early days with that little Aladdin's-Cave of a shop in the middle of town.... about 35 years ago when I regularly drove past that part of Devon on my way back from Plymouth.

Now the comments here are mostly in the negative spectrum.

Times change.
 
I am willing to bet it will be down to cash flow and shipping issues / costs.
Hopefully Axminster will be able to hang on until things improve, I like having a local Axminster store and would hate to lose it.
 
The main reason that most businesses are out of most things, is a strange one. When china closed down at the start of last year, not only were there shortages of everything manufactured, but once delivered and unloaded, all the empty shipping containers stayed where they were unloaded, rather than being refilled and returned.
The entire world is suffering shortages now because (just like the trains after a rail strike) all the containers are in the wrong place.
Due to the slowness of sea shipping, it will still be several months before the supply line is back to normal.

I too used to visit axminster when it was JUST axminster tools. I've bought quite a bit from them then and since.
They are good as a company, but their equipment, like almost all big companies now, suffers from the same "build it cheap, get it out the door" mind set, that delivers stuff that really is not fit for purpose and lets the customer do the quality control for them.
"it doesnt work sir? Send it back sir, another will be with you tomorrow" Is actually cheaper than making the manufacturers police their own quality control.
Many machines with minor faults get either fixed or tolerated by the customer.
The bad ones that get sent back are then made to work and sold off as refurbs.

I've had good, and I've had very bad indeed from axminster tools. But as long as people want big machines at cheap prices, nothing will change.

By the way, I have a couple of planes for sale if you really cant wait :lol: :lol: :lol: 8-)
 
I too hope that Axi get their act together and survive. I have had good machines from them in the past and good service with those.

They lurched very much in the direction of Chinese made own brand, such as Rider plans that had truly abysmal quality control, and cut back their machinery range to re-badged Chinese stuff too. This has ended up with a lot of internet people criticising them for quality and service. I stopped going partly because they never had stock of the Veritas or Lie Nielson items I wanted.

But whether we are professionals or hobbyists, we do need decent machinery and tool suppliers that don't require a full day trip to visit. I like visiting my local(ish) Axi and have enjoyed some of their courses (I learnt to turn there), so hope they begin to recover a reputation for quality and sensible pricing. They really need to get close to the likes of FFX on Festool and other branded gear prices, or people will use Axi as a check it out shop and buy elsewhere on-line.
 
i too hope this is a sign of Axminster starting to find their way. Not too long ago I found one of their old catalogues predating their adoption of the Rider Brand and felt they had simply dropped UK manufacturers.

Clifton seem to be universally out of stock which I find surprising as they are made in Sheffield?
 
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