I am very sorry to announce that I am no longer doing minor setup jobs with banjos being shipped. However if you can bring them and stay a few hours and take them with you I will still do some. There are 2 different reasons for this and I have been trying to hold out at it as long as I possibly could, but age, health etc. is not letting me work 12 - 15 hours seven days a week like I have been doing most of the time for the past 10 years. I have been losing some banjo sales due to doing so much of this and doesn't allow me enough time to keep stock models of banjos all the time and some are spur of the moment buyers. If you don't have a model they want they will go elsewhere. I just looked around the shop today and have two banjos that I have not even unboxed yet. With five Custom ones to build and an email today about another one and about 10 necks to make and try to keep stock models built which are selling about as fast as I can get them done seems my days are just not long enough any more. A lot of times it takes almost as long to unpack and repack ready to ship as it does to do the small job they are sent for. Then I take them to UPS to ship.
Another major reason is the shipping companies are so crooked it is big job to collect insurance if they damage the banjo. And the shipper is the one who has to file the claim and collect it even tho the owner has paid for it. The last claim I had we never collected I replaced the resonator out of my pocket even tho the buyer had paid for ins. Bev spent about a month off and on getting the runaround till we finally gave up. It would be very sad to do 75.00 worth of work and the owner pay for ins. and his banjo get destroyed and I have to pay for an expensive banjo. It would take a lot of these little jobs to dig my way out of that hole. I hear of more and more cases all the time that shipping ins. doesn't pay.