BUTTERS announced yesterday that throughout 2007 it is offering a 7 year warranty on it's professional/industrial MIG sets.
WOW! I initially thought, they have really thrown down the gauntlet, NO other manufacturer has ever offered a seven year warranty; a perfect 'one-up' sales opportunity!
And then I slept on it ... concluding:-
a).Although much better quality than the likes of SIP/SEALEY they are not that good, certainly not to the standard of the old, traditional British built Butters machines.
b).As a dealer I could be inundated with very costly warranty returns after 2 or 3 years, let alone 7! Butters would provide warranty parts FOC but what if machines had to be collected & returned? £50 each way on a carrier, no thanks - profit gone!
c).On reading the small print I find that it only covers the main transformer, choke transformer & rectifier! I have been in the job most of my working life & I have had one main transformer fail (and this was because the user had a 180amp Mig for production batch work!!). Transformers virtually never fail! The 'hard working' components are things like the main contactor unit & it's usually electronics that fail.
So, the warranty doesn't mean much at all; bit of a marketing con (SIP do the same with a 5 year warranty on some of their main transformers).
I'm sticking to the PORTAMIG. You have to wait a fortnight for one to be built for you! & they only offer a mandatory 12 months warranty,
but they are built the old fashion way (at least as close as you will get nowadays for the money). They can't build them fast enough which is testament to their quality & no marketing cons needed!
weldequip
WOW! I initially thought, they have really thrown down the gauntlet, NO other manufacturer has ever offered a seven year warranty; a perfect 'one-up' sales opportunity!
And then I slept on it ... concluding:-
a).Although much better quality than the likes of SIP/SEALEY they are not that good, certainly not to the standard of the old, traditional British built Butters machines.
b).As a dealer I could be inundated with very costly warranty returns after 2 or 3 years, let alone 7! Butters would provide warranty parts FOC but what if machines had to be collected & returned? £50 each way on a carrier, no thanks - profit gone!
c).On reading the small print I find that it only covers the main transformer, choke transformer & rectifier! I have been in the job most of my working life & I have had one main transformer fail (and this was because the user had a 180amp Mig for production batch work!!). Transformers virtually never fail! The 'hard working' components are things like the main contactor unit & it's usually electronics that fail.
So, the warranty doesn't mean much at all; bit of a marketing con (SIP do the same with a 5 year warranty on some of their main transformers).
I'm sticking to the PORTAMIG. You have to wait a fortnight for one to be built for you! & they only offer a mandatory 12 months warranty,
but they are built the old fashion way (at least as close as you will get nowadays for the money). They can't build them fast enough which is testament to their quality & no marketing cons needed!
weldequip
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