Things beyond our control...
Doubt LHR would give you a machine at $1400.00.... Looks like you just got caught up in the transition time of "I don't Know" and more than likely you are out of a machine for a few months with your money tied up. Don't think anyone will post any real information about what was going on. Decision's made at the Corporation level are made at a time to cause the least resistance to employee or in your case customer problems.
Case in point.... San Diego in 1999, Sony and Qual Comm were in a partnership to make Cell Phones. Qual Comm developed the CDMA technology Coded Division Mutable Access, that let a Cell phone tower antenna go from transmitting and receiving one phone call per antenna to a digital multiplex that let the same antenna transmit and receive 16 or 32 phone calls at a time in Analog. Breaking each sound bite into digital and transmitting and receiving it in bits and reassembling it very quickly so you never know the difference.
Qual comm was keeping the information very tight and would not share willingly with Sony. The Qual Comm/Sony phone in production was a Generation 3 Chip Set if I remember right and Qual Comm had just released to market a Qual Comm only Generation 4 Chip Set Phone with more features. So who was going to buy last year's model from Sony / Qual Comm?.... It was a holiday Monday weekend and after Sony San Diego had closed on Friday the decision to close the whole Sony / Qual Comm division was made in Japan. They didn't want any LEAKS to San Diego.... On Tuesday Morning everyone shows up and the first thing they find is everyone's email was not working. ( Years earlier at Sony a FIRED Employee send a Nasty eMail to "ALL" including all of JAPAN containing many 4 letter words. Sony Learned from that....) Shortly after the start time a meeting was called in the main conference room. The meeting started out with a summary of all the GREAT things that had been accomplished.... It ended in "Everyone here is FIRED and we are closing down the whole division. In the mean time both day and night shift of the Sony Security Guards had moved in outside the conference room and small groups were escorted one on one to there desk where they found a white copy paper box. In the box was placed everything of a personnel nature under the video and one on one surveillance. The employee was then walked to his car in the Badge activated Secure Parking lot and the badge was retrieved from the employee as he or she was asked to leave under the watchful eye of a San Diego Sheriff's Car outside the gate........
As a Calibration Lab guy I spent two weeks with the Phone group as a HP Calibration Team did all the high end CDMA test equipment calibration as I updated the equipment records for Sony. The average piece of Sony Test Equipment was worth between $20k and $100K.
That just goes to show you the length a company will go through to protect it's property from disgruntled employees.
This story has a nice ending as within a few months Erickson hired almost every former Sony employee and developed a new Cell Phone with Qual Comm.
In the down sizing I saw in the picture tube production side of Sony it was the same.... Your E Mail was off when you entered work that day and a call to the Network guy was followed by a "I will look into it".... followed by a Click.... He knew...... One Manager called to the office and given a Copy Paper Box and a escort was very shocked as His Wife was in the upper ring of the Human Resources office..... That had to hurt...... The 4 buildings at Sony are now just a dusty parking lot.... The main Engineering Building still stands and is active.
So with the Corporate Sears and LHR no one is going to talk as LHR tries to build the bridge back to a nice relationship with Sears...... And Sears looks at it's MASSIVE LOSS and just laughs.... Who gets caught in the middle..... You do mwildes.
Have seen Sears / K Mart in the news as talk of splitting off the unprofitable side of the business divisions. K Mart is playing hard ball too with it's employees. I have a family friend who has worked in Corporate K Mart for 20 years. In an attempt to cut the fat or get rid of future retirement payments they played the Moving Game with the Manager. Moved 3 times in 3 years finally told he was going to inner city Detroit, MI with kids in High School. He finally had enough and QUIT... That was the goal of K Mart..... Make em Miserable and hope they QUIT..... My uncle worked for a Local K mart in the 80's and just as he had enough time to start getting medical they "Let him go".... But offered them all a new job doing the same at starting pay..... To this day I don't shop at K Mart....
The first few pictures are a year old and show the Sony Buildings I worked in as a dusty parking lot in the making and the last one was the first building I worked in at Sony in Philly as a Service Center. We closed that building and combined into one. Two years later it too was gone... From 27 service Centers in the US in 2000 to 1 in San Diego in 2005.....
They call it progress..... The cost to fix electronics like the DVD Player, Phones and Play Station. I did Play Stations for about 2 years of my 4 in Philly and in the end a repair was a swap out with a refurbished unit and yours went to Mexico to be done on an assembly line...
I actually had 14.25 seconds of fame shown on the CBS Evening News on Thanksgiving Day of 2002. This story aired and I missed getting it on VHS but the written story is here. The video was on line for a few years.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/...in531184.shtml
I was currently working on Sony Tivo's fixing a power supply problem in about a dozen boards when the film crew of CBS Evening News did this story and they filmed me fixing a power supply. About 14.25 seconds of it ended up on TV with other technicians being shown doing various work. Two years later they were closed..... I was getting just over $20.00 per hour.... As a Technician not a supervisor...... In Mexico..... $20.00 a WEEK......
All 3 Navy Ships that I have served on have been sunk as a target or scrapped. Here is the last one I was on, that was a target for the Battle Group going to the Pursan Gulf a few years ago. Live Firing, Real Targets, Decommissioned unmanned ships but still targets.. Real World training. Look at Final Mission..... http://sinkex.uss-buchanan-ddg14.org/
The Sony Picture Tube Division made tubes in a 24 hour day for over 20 years and at it's peek when I was there made 32, 27, 20 TV Tubes and 19 and 17 inch Computer Monitor Tubes in the 4 buildings in a row. They had a tile hallway from one end to the other that was called the Mile of Tile.... You couldn't take pictures inside the building but as you walked the Mile of Tile windows looked in on production and the Fanuc Yellow Robots going about it's business of moving tubes around. It was a state of the art plant... Now a Parking lot. Sad.... I was touring the 32 inch TV Assembly area the morning when the Oklahoma City building went down. Imagine seeing it on Forty 32 inch TV's in test mode showing broadcast TV on a conveyor and all showing the devastation. On 911 I was in Philly fixing a playstation and my work bench TV showed the first hit.... as did the 45 other Technicians in 4 rows of benches and conveyors. Work stopped....
Times change and we must change with it.... I honestly question the stability of LHR in light of the past year. Lets hope they keep going and start making a profit and move on to a bigger home user model. Then we get into the problem of service..... Can you really ship a 500 pound 24 or 48 inch machine back to LHR a few times for service and they still make money.....
LHR you have my FULL SUPPORT..... Every Anatomy of "?" Post I make is another unpaid Customer Support posting making for a healthier population of Carve Machine Users. And I learned from the BETA Group myself reading SO many posts before my machine even arrived.
As for creating more excitement among Carve Users the release of a rotary sled around the Christmas Buying Season would be a great boost to the Interest and make for a great TV Commercial.... But I don't have any inside info for this product just wishful thinking of what I would try to do as LHR. They can use all that April Survey info to know what TV Program to buy TV Commercial Time on to catch MY eye..... Snicker..... And based on how much I make they will know how much to charge..... Snicker.....
Good Luck,
AL