Saturday 23 April 2016

Salute ate my Homework

Feeling a bit grumpy today as I am trying to get an order from the Assault group sorted out.

Yesterday I posted on TMP to see if I could get a helpful response but got some well meaning answers and the usual "Salute" excuse. A suggestion to post on their Facebook page was a good idea. The message I posted is below.

Is anyone else having problems with their orders from the Assault Group?
On the 9/3/2016. I ordered six items of spare kit to dress up some ACAV's, a British mortar team to convert to Falklands era, and four packs of WW2 Ghurkas.
The order arrived on 7/4/2016 and found that I had been given Modern British instead of the Ghurkas, The spare bits had been double highlighted on the Packing slip but none of the figure packs had been checked off.
I immediately sent an email to Pete to advise that the order was about 35 percent wrong but have not had a reply.
A week later I sent an email to the address listed on the Website and another to Pete but have still not heard anything. I've only had really good service from TAG previously and have had good communications from them so am a bit puzzled as to what to do now.
Cheers
Dan

Salute is a one day show which I had been to several times when I lived in London during the Mid 80's. Going from the photo reports it has grown to a very large event.

However, that does not help me very much as I live on the other side of the World and rely on Mail Order to get my Models.

About 2006 I was painting up my Dads Army Project and needed some Tanks and transport. I had seen some models I liked from Chieftain Models and ordered a light Armoured Car, Matilda 1 and a truck. The order went through ok but was informed that there would be a delay because they were out of stock on some items and were waiting for the caster to catch up. About three months later I got the order with an early Stuart Mk1 as an apology for the delay.

After these models were completed I felt that I needed some Vickers light Tanks and A13's from the same source. I emailed ahead of time and made sure that they had in stock what was needed. I had a polite couple of emails and was advised that the Vickers were in stock but advised against buying the A13's as the molds were worn out. I then ordered and paid for three Vickers Tanks.

About a month later I was informed that my models (which I had paid for) had been taken to Salute and sold. There was then a couple of months wait for the caster to get through his backlog of orders and get my models ready. I was then sent the three Vickers and an Indian Pattern Armoured Car as compensation.

Now the Early Stuart and the Indian Pattern Armoured Car sat in a box for years tempting me to do something with them. I had no intention of starting a project just for them but wanted to paint them up. With the growth of Bolt Action I felt that making a small Indian Force would be a good way of using them without going the whole hog and buying a Japanese Force etc. I then filled out other orders buying up Indians from North Star and other supports from Warlord. I then wanted a squad of Ghurkas. The options were Warlord or TAG. I really like TAG figures and thought of getting some of their Japanese eventually. The Warlord boxed set had too many figures for what I wanted so settled on TAG.

Well, I received Modern British instead of the Ghurkas and am unable to get a response from TAG. Now I feel like throwing the whole project into the bin as its so obviously DOOMED to failure and would never get me the results on the table that would make up for all the hassle.

I have started selling off some Die-cast Vehicles and Aircraft that I cannot use on our local Trademe site which is a bit like Ebay but supposed to be NZ only. I am very tempted to put this project on it as well.

Good news is that the spare bits I got from TAG are being very useful to dress up the four ACAV's (from TAG), M577 and a Mortar Track. So stay tuned for a more positive post about them.

EDIT, I got hold of Pete through the Facebook page which got immediate attention with the promise to send the correct packets ASAP and with an apology. I hope my above comments were taken as tongue in cheek and light hearted humour.

1 comment:

I am turning off comments for now as a certain Peter Smith has been spamming me endlessly, and it's wasting my time moderating it. I hope that does not put off genuine commentators who may want to comment later.

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