> I hope we can all recognize intent and effort and only
> encourage future endeavors in our hobby. I wish I had more
> of that kind of risk-taking attitude in my own life. We
> frequently only hear about those people like Herman Van den
> Akker, Richard Good and others who are successful with
> getting their innovative products out to us. We need more like
> Jim who are willing to stick their necks out and try to deliver
> something new to our hobby.
That is a pretty passive attitude to hold when someone used your money to to
develop an imaginary product. You were the one that took the risk, not
Jim... what did Jim risk? Maybe his credibility, something he lost a long
long time ago, but he certainly had no intention of having any out of pocket
expenses when he offered this deal. He was using the money you sent him to
develop a product, there was no risk in it for him.
HVDA, Good, myself and others do not finance our businesses by asking you to
buy a product that does not exist in order that we can manufacturer that
product. That is the risk that a business owner assumes by going into
business, if no one likes your product(s) you go out of business.
Businesses should not hang that responsibility on the shoulders of their
customers by getting them to finance their entire development program.
Jim is a con artist of the most basic definition. He made grand promises,
took your money and disappeared.
If anyone wants to step up their pursuit of a Jim Swarthout, contact the
Florida Board of Professsional Engineers. It will simply open up another
legal avenue for those of you willing to explore it... and the FBPE will
probably tell you what they told me two years ago, Jim Swarthout was not an
engineer in any sense of the word, contrary to what he claimed and
advertised.
Why am I so sure that the valve covers will never materialize? First,
because JS said they would be produced by a friend of his that owns a
foundry, if you met the minimum order number, the foundry would fit him in i
n a relatively short period of time (certainly less than three months) when
the foundry was running at one of its slow periods. That did not happen.
The excuse was that the minimum number of valve covers needed was not met
and the foundry could not fit him in. So what does he do? He takes more
orders to get up to the minimum so that the foundry could get him in.
Eighteen months go by, no valve covers no more news about the foundry (at
least publically on the list). Then I see his website, with a HUGE piece of
billet being machined on a mill to create the valve cover. Now just ball
parking this type of production, based on my very limited production
experience, you're talking $300+ in material and labor to produce such a
small batch of valve covers by essentially hand. The hunk of billet alone
costs more than each of the $100 or whatever that everyone contributed.
If Jim had the financial resources to write-off the subtantial additional
expenses for machining the covers out of billet, he would have done so by
now, and produced the valve covers and sent them out to everyone. The more
time that passes the more you can be assured that your money is never going
to be returned, because the price of raw materials and machining labor NEVER
goes down.
List members can flame me all they want, but if I have convinced one person
that is a victim of Jim's deception to take more aggressive action against
Jim, it will be a good thing. The bottom line is, the longer you are
missing your money the less of chance you have of recovering it. Why some
people are willing to wait for a box to materialize in the hands of the UPS
man I have no idea. The only thing that has materialized out of Jim, with
specific regard to the valve covers, were empty and unmet promises.
Kai
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