The Ries Tripods business status thread

[Dhanner]

3 weeks? I've been waiting months. Ugh. I need to call again. Emails aren't working. They have\had my original 1/4-20 and the new 3/8 camera screw with the bad brass nut. Same issue, too small to screw on. Spencer said parts shipped in April.

CH

Unfortunately a call is in order. Not sure what I am going to do at this point. Seems like he just doesn’t have any good ones or is only using them for complete tripods and heads.


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[Drew Wiley]

Sounds like the Donner Party. Ran out of supplies, and now has to either cannibalize or die.

[Dhanner]

Received the following e-mail from Spencer today!

Very exciting to hear this!

“Dave,

After your last email showing the issues with those screws I had a coming to Jesus moment. Ries Tripod Needed Leadership.

1. Fired our contractors that we were using to make the brass nuts and screws.
2. Bought another CNC Machine.
3. Brought in 2 Master Machinists to train my folks how to properly machine all of the hardware.
4. I also brought in a Sigma 6 expert to show how to recognize issues and improve our products.

You were not the only customer that had some issues with our products. We are contacting all of these customers and making it right.

We will always stand behind our customer service. We have stumbled recently after we had a flood but we faced our issues and will continue to improve.

I am sorry that these issues took this long to fix, but I believe we are there.

I am sending you, today, 2 new complete screws USPS Priority mail.

The new screws come with a newly designed brass nut and are made by us in house. The screw has been improved by eliminating the press on collar and replacing it with a tapped collar that can accomodate custom thread lengths. Again, made in house by us.

Please, if you know of any other issues, please let me know. Ries Products come with a full lifetime warranty. We will always be here for you.”


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[bmikiten]

I'm impressed but as someone who was in manufacturing for years running a large operation, Sigma 6 may be a bit of a reach. Good for them!

[Jim Andrada]

It might be a shade "optimistic" without a significant investment in QC, but as an objective 6 Sigma is great.

[Tin Can]

I almost bought a new giant Ries

then you made HUGE price increases

and now you think SIGMA 6

will save...

glad I have a very old

PERFECT

Ries Model C Deluxe

[AuditorOne]

My old Ries is terrific and I love it. Sorry your new one doesn't meet that standard. Hopefully they will get better.

[Fred L]

hope the new screws do the job ! I think it would be worthwhile for Ries to incorporate QR plates into the A and J heads, similar to what Luland has. Would make life much simpler for me when trying to mount the 7x17

[Drew Wiley]

Of all the crazy things, I had the owner of a local automated lathe manufacturing startup walk out on me when I told him the price of a long Starrett caliper. So he ordered a cheap one from China. Then he measured a particular threaded post on his lathe prototype for sake of chucks, and ordered those chucks themselves from China too. They took a long time to get, and none of them fit. He had already sold a couple dozen lathes in advance at around 70K apiece, and his customers were getting impatient. Then he located a subcontractor in India who promised delivery in under a week. Those chucks did arrive promptly, but none of those fit either. He went into a panic and phoned them, and they told him they kept their promise to ship promptly, but that they never promised a thing about the diameter or threads matching! And he had the nerve to commiserate all this to me, after accusing us of being overpriced, then going out and making his own incorrect measurement using a junk caliper. Poetic justice. His next stop was with a bankruptcy attorney.

All it takes is one critical component being off; or one parts subcontractor failing at their end.

[Jim Andrada]

Well, I was involved in moving the assembly line for IBM LTO tape drives from Japan to China. And this isn't a story about crappy Chinese goods - by the time we qualified the factory the quality of the product was better than what had been made in Japan - because there was a full time contingent of Japanese engineers at the factory and it was managed just like the original factory with a lot of the original team members and the quality improvement process stayed in place.

One thing I noticed was that relatively non-critical measurements were made with Chinese measuring tools, but the high precision stuff was measured with 100% high end Mitutoyo equipment in temperature/humidity controlled clean rooms.

By the way, oddly enough even though they spell it "Mitutoyo" it's actually pronounced "MitSutoyo" because the "tu" sound doesn't exist in Japanese and the sound "tsu" can be represented as "tu" in the alternative official Romanization system. You could at one time see the same thing on the napkins used on the high speed trains - it was written as "Sinkansen" although pronounced as "SHinkansen" because, again, the "si" sound doesn't exist in the language and the written "si" is pronounced as "shi" .