Does railflyer still exist? railflyermodel.com is still up and I placed an order and got confimation and a paypal receipt, but that was the first week of august and I haven’t heard anything since. I couldn’t get through by phone and they haven’t responded to my emails.
I know it is a small shop, and he is a commercial pilot. Not sure if he is still flying, but if so, he is often is called up on short notice. So he can be hard to get a hold of.
He did announce some new products recently. His last email I saw on another list was the 7th of August, and he stated they are very busy.
That is all I know.
While Christopher’s products are great and he is a visionary when it comes to where he wants the hobby to go (check out his drive system with separate micro motors for each axle!), his attitude toward his customers and modelers in general is not good to say the least. He’s been booted off several forums. He has a history of delayed shipments of product, at times it has taken anywhere from 2-3 weeks to a year to get orders. So if you like his stuff, you’ll just have to have patience. His wife does the shipping, so if you haven’t got it yet, then it isn’t in stock yet. Btw, he’s a corporate pilot which is why he can be called away anytime, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the above issues. I buy from him because his products are really second to none, but buyer beware, recieving it can take a while sometimes.
Railflyer traction motors & trucks: http://www.railflyermodel.com/collections/model-kit-drive-motor
I just saw a message from Railflyer forwarded to a mailing list.
The owner announced he will seek creditor protection Tuesday (Sept 4), since he hasn’t been able to attract any OEM work.
What happens next is anyone’s guess.
The order taking part of Railflyer works great. The shippiing department is out of business. I ordered about $500 dollars worth of parts from them 16 months ago and have recieved about $35 to date. And he will not respond to my e-mails or phone calls. You should contact PayPal RIGHT NOW and have them reverse the charges.
Here is a message I just received from Chris Howard, owner of RFMP:
Richard,
Don’t believe everything you read.
We recently got a new CNC that can cut our own moulds and we have an injection mould machine inbound for January. We lost about 20 moulds in China, hence the delays but there are some guys trying to put us under with these comments.
We are doing our own tooling now so we can control the process and quality.
Once the dust settles, plan a visit. By January we’ll have the injection mold machine, the CNC is starting to pump out some good parts.
CJH
My comment:
A lot of smaller manufacturers suffered because of the China situation: look at Deluxe Innovations, which hasn’t produced much of anything for at least 4 years. I have preorders from them dating to March 2008! I know RailFlyer is basically a 2-3 person part-time operation. The SM 0402 LEDs I ordered apparently have to be individually wired by Wendy, Chris Howard’s wife, on top of everything else she does. I can tell they’re under stress, but as someone else has said, the stuff he’s doing is so visionary and revolutionary you have to hope they can pull it off.
Richard M.
My Models & I stand behind them.
This week I received a shipping notice, & my parts are on their way.
Knowing & understanding their operation, & the quality of the products, they are worth the wait to me.
IMHO
I second Crazy Trains advice on this, immediately contact Paypal and reverse the charges.
There are some very interesting threads over at MRH. I would NOT do any business with this "company"and before you feel like arguing with me, go over to MRH and do some reading.
Any orders he may be filling seem to be remaining stock.
I’m actually excited to know they’ll be handling production themselves. His designs really are very good from what I’ve seen, and I want to try one of their full diesel kits when they’re available.[:)]
Just to follow up, I got an email that part of my order has shipped. According to their website and other news it sounds like they have new CNC and other tooling in the works so I imagine that there is more to come.