If different forum members keep posting problems about the clamps, is it an exaggeration?
Gardiner's claim 1% of clamps have problems, that would mean for every 1,000 clamps, 10 clamps would fail, or one clamp in about every 200 poles
i know someone with 3 Gardiner's poles, all 3 have had clamp problems, he wouldn't liked to told he was exaggerating
Hi again "Alex." or whoever you really are
You always have such a keen interest in our products
To give an accurate picture of %.
About 6 months ago we were having about 3-4% poles with a gluing issue - so for every 1000 poles sold 30-40 would have some kind of issue. Unfortunately for some clients these would often bunch together from the same batch so if a client ordered more than one pole from those batches they may well experience multiple problems.
From the batches sold about 2-3 months ago the problem is down to just under 1% of poles affected - so for every 1000 sold we have found about 10 poles have had some kind of issue.
For the
current batches being sold the issue is down to about
0.25% of poles affected - so far every 1000 sold we are getting about 2-3 poles affected.
Many of these gluing issues only happened after several months of hard use and yet we have always rectified the problem for a client.
It would be great to have a product that had zero chance of a defect, but in reality with manufacturing this is rarely possible. We have worked very hard over the last 6 months to eradicate this issue for our clients and it has paid off. The current figure about 0.25% is very, very small, but we still feel that it can be improved on which is why we have introduced some new techniques on the assembly line to try and get this down to about 0.1%.
Having spent many years previously retailing X-Tel poles we found that these poles usually had about 1-2% fault rate (unglued clamps, jammed section, cracked clamps etc.) so I think that we are now probably well below industry average in problem rate.
This is something I take very seriously as it has affected some potential clients perception of the product and has caused inconvenience to some of our current clients. Hence the time spent behind the scenes in the factory to ensure this becomes a thing of the past.