{"id":416,"date":"2021-11-23T17:00:09","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T22:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/?p=416"},"modified":"2021-11-23T17:00:09","modified_gmt":"2021-11-23T22:00:09","slug":"covid-19-vs-my-etsy-store-vs-my-failing-laser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/?p=416","title":{"rendered":"COVID-19 vs. my Etsy store vs. My Failing Laser"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My last cut for Etsy didn&#8217;t cut properly.\u00a0 I got out my laser power meter, locked down the studio, put on my $$$ CO2 safety goggles and did a test.\u00a0 My 100W laser is now cutting at around 40W.<\/p>\n<p>Well, that&#8217;s not good.\u00a0 I need to sell a lot of product and buy a new laser.\u00a0 I&#8217;ll use the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.protohaven.org\/\">Protohaven<\/a> laser and oh look, I&#8217;m out of Baltic Birch.<\/p>\n<p>A few months ago, maybe March?\u00a0 April? I called the local plywood company I&#8217;ve used for years and placed an order for Baltic Birch.<\/p>\n<p>Well, started to place an order and was informed that there is no Baltic Birch coming in to the US in the know future and everyone is out of inventory.<\/p>\n<p>I called my backup dealer (same quality, longer drive to will-call) and got the same basic story:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Containers that used to rent for $4,000 now rent for $20,000.\u00a0 These are the big semi-shaped boxes you see on all the cargo ships.<\/li>\n<li>There are only &#8220;a handful&#8221; (maybe 5 or 6) companies that make Baltic Birch and they are all in China or Russia<\/li>\n<li>None of the companies will even take an order because they have no idea when &#8212; or IF &#8212; it will ship.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I do have some acrylic I was going to use for a new synthesizer stand and I can cut that with 40W.\u00a0 Not sure what the profit margin is, but let&#8217;s say I do have $3,000 to buy a 200-250W laser.\u00a0 How long will it take for that laser to get from China to the east coast?<\/p>\n<p>Etsy store is effectively closed until I sort this out.\u00a0 Not the best news for my fiscal year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My last cut for Etsy didn&#8217;t cut properly.\u00a0 I got out my laser power meter, locked down the studio, put on my $$$ CO2 safety goggles and did a test.\u00a0 My 100W laser is now cutting at around 40W. Well, that&#8217;s not good.\u00a0 I need to sell a lot of product and buy a new [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digifab","category-lasersaur"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=416"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":417,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416\/revisions\/417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.flatline.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}