GoodBuyGuys Blog

I have a tractor. It’s just a small one that I use for mowing and landscaping. Its a 1986 model and pretty much held together by wire ties and gaffers tape. But that’s not the point of this blog posting.

As I said, my little Japanese tractor is 20 years old. The amazing thing about this little workhorse is all the implements that my neighbor uses on his 40 year old Ford red belly tractor will fit my tractor too. The mower, the spreader, the bucket scoop-they’ll all work on both tractors.

Even more amazing, both his implements and mine will work on a brand new tractor being imported from Russia or China. Fifty years of tractor manufacturing across the globe and all the implements will work on all three tractors (and thousands of others).

Can you think of any other mechanical system with this sort of compatibility? Imagine a window mechanism from a ‘56 Chevy working on a 2004 Lexus. Not in a million years!

At first, I thought that this was some sort of great master plan by farmers and tractor makers, but now I believe that something else is going on. Something that all the tractor manufacturers really regret.

Here’s what I think happened.

It doesn’t take long for most farmers and landscapers to have as much invested in their implements as they do in the tractor. A good tow behind mower can cost as much as $1000.00 and its not unusual for a farmer to have a dozen or more implements all designed to work with the three point hitch and the power-take-off on the back of the tractor. Implements usually last a long time.

What this means is that even if the tractor manufacturer came up with a better system for attaching the implements to the tractor and powering their moving parts, the farmer wouldn’t buy it because it would mean that his old implements wouldn’t work with the new tractor. This back-and-forth decision making by the farmer-this year I need a new plow, next year I need a new tractor-means that the tractor builders can never make the system obsolete.

You’ll never find a farmer taking his implements to the landfill the way we all dispose of our old electronics because some new upgrade (e.g. USB ports on computers) makes the old system obsolete and the new component incompatible.

Just a theory, but I think that its a pretty good one.

Know of another idea that has risen above planned obsolescence? Let us know.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies

I subscribe to a great Google service called “Google Alerts”. You set up your alerts by entering in key words, and Google will send you an email about news stories anytime your keyword appears in an online posting.

Naturally, one of my key words is “duct tape”. Anytime the term “duct tape” appears in a story that Google has indexed, they send me a link to that web page. It is a great time saver and quite often leads to some amazing info.

Unfortunately, a great preponderance of duct tape stories are crime-related. It seems that duct tape is the restraint of choice in a lot of really creepy crimes.

This morning’s alert, however was really amazing. Here’s how the headline from the British newspaper , The Telegraph, read:

Crumbling Cathedral Held Together By Tape

Now, we know that duct tape can be used for a lot of amazing things, but holding together a 500 year old stone cathedral never crossed my mind. Canterbury Cathedral is beginning a $100,000,000.00 fundraising campaign for restoration of this world renowned building, and you, must admit, this made for a pretty compelling headline. It got my attention.

Pieces of the stone columns are coming off, and if you believe the spokespersons for the campaign, one in every five columns holding up the roof have had duct tape applied for some sort of short term repair.

Believe it or not, we have a product that’s even better for holding stone columns together than duct tape. Its called Gorilla Tape, and I am guessing that if the folks at Canterbury Cathedral used this, they could buy another 500 years.

We wish this campaign well, and hope that they are successful in stabilizing and restoring this amazing building. Meanwhile, if they need duct tape, the Goodbuybuys are ready to go to work. England, here we come.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies

If you follow this blog at all, you know that I don’t hesitate to slam a service or product if I feel that good value or customer care are not part of the equation.

Well, it only seems fair that when I come across a really exceptional product or service, then that should get fair coverage as well. I’d always rather write about something positive.

It would be hard to write too many positives about my recent experience with the service department of Midas, the company that makes high end sound reinforcement mixers.

We were involved several years ago in the upgrade of the sound system at Kenan Stadium, the football stadium at UNC Chapel Hill, my alma mater. There had been a problem with the Midas Venice 2400 that had been installed during the upgrade and it became necessary to return it to Midas for service.

We contacted the regional Midas rep who not only arranged for us to get priority treatment from the Midas service center in Minnesota, but also provided, at no cost, a loaner Midas mixer for the stadium sound crew to use until the repair could be made.

After shipping the mixer (using the online service form they provided was simple), we were able to get updated status info on the repair every time I gave them a call. No being put on hold. No voice mail. No “we’ll get back to you”. Just friendly, informed technicians who knew exactly what was going on with the mixer.

When Midas found out that this mixer was in use in a 60,000 seat stadium and UNC was in the middle of the football season, their techs assured us that the mixer would be back in time for the next home game. They got it back to us a full five days before the promised date!

No quibbling about warranty-we were half way through a 3 year warranty period. No problem with return shipping-Midas paid it. No problem with follow up information-Midas told us exactly what the problem was and what they did to fix it.

We have a Midas Venice 320 in our rental equipment pool and I am looking forward to our next mixer purchase. It will be a Midas!

Got a story about great customer service that our readers might find valuable? Let us know!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies

There’s nothing like a real world test to let you know if a product performs as advertised.Goodbuyguys.com got its start doing hands on special event and concert production and began selling the products we used all the time. We don’t do too much “hands on” event work anymore, so its a little more difficult to check out our products.

When I decided to build an outdoor kitchen this summer, I thought it might be nice to cover part of our new patio with an awning. I welded up the frames and mounted them to the side of the house and then went to an old friend who is a sign painter to get the awning cover.

At his suggestion, several years ago, I had replaced an awning by using a vinyl banner that he provided. It worked great and saved a lot of money, so I decided I would use a banner instead of having a custom awning made.

We had grommets set on 6 inch centers rather than on just the corners so that it could be stretched tightly over the frame.

Now for the test.

We have sold wire ties for years, mainly to expo companies and installers who use them for bundling cables. All of our black wire ties are supposed to contain ultraviolet light protection to keep them from breaking down due to exposure to sunlight. I was able to stretch the awning/banner to the frame using 11 inch black wire ties and it looks great. If the UV protection works as advertised by the manufacturer, the ties should last as long as the awning.

Check back with me in a few months and I’ll let you know how they are holding up.

Goodbuyguys.com is a collection of web sites (including buytape.com, buybattery.com, buymicstand.com, buyextensioncord.com, buyaflashlight.com and buywireties.com) designed to deliver a great selection of entertainment production and audiovisual supplies.

Imagine my satisfaction in discovering this morning that one of our goodbuyguys.com sites, buybattery.com, has achieved page two ranking in google for the search term “duracell”. This is amazing, particularly when you realize that entering “duracell” in the google search engine returns 9,550,000 hits.

Our web developer, Dale Norris, has been working on this site since June and he has followed all the generally accepted search engine optimization strategies to achieve this ranking. No secrets. Just hard work. His attention to detail never ceases to amaze me and his ability to stick with a task day after day is amazing to behold. No one web master has a complete knowleged of how to achieve top rankings in search engines (no matter what your email may say.) Dale is part of a really amazing community of open source web developers and he gives as much to this community as he gets. His contributions to goodbuyguys.com reflect greatly on the open source community.

Goodbuyguys.com is a collection of web sites (including buytape.com, buybattery.com, buymicstand.com, buyextensioncord.com, buyaflashlight.com and buywireties.com) designed to deliver a great selection of entertainment production and audiovisual supplies.

In the coming months, we look forward to adding sites like buygels.com and buywirelessmic.com to our goodbuyguys roster.

Dale will continue to work on buybattery.com until its page 1. Keep checking at google. I know he can do it.