Saturday evening I posted a rant about a struggle I was having with the Akeda dovetail jig, trying to cut box joints according to the instruction manual. The special straight cutter wouldn't clear the guide bushing for
1/2" stock settings.This afternoon, I stopped by my local Rockler, and tried to buy a proper guide bushing. We went through every Porter Cable and Rockler option that made any kind of sense, and couldn't find one to work. We even considered drilling out one of their brass guides...
So I called Akeda's tech support line. And got Kevan, who is evidently tech support, product engineering, and CEO, all wrapped up in one. After explaining that I had purchased this jig 18 months ago, and what I was trying to do, he told me he knew about the problem, that it was an oversight on their part, and could he send, at no charge, the proper guide bushing to solve the problem? He couldn't guarantee that it would leave today, but certainly by tomorrow morning...
So maybe it's a Canadian thing. This is the sort of service one hears about from Lee Valley. It's nice to find that it exists elsewhere as well.
Problem most likely solved. Blood pressure returning to normal.
And the guys at Rockler, who didn't even sell the jig, were great, too. (They would have liked to, but Woodcraft had an exclusive at the time.)
Patriarch