Cost of shipping from the USA

2) australia is of a relatively small population on a remote island adjacent to nothing. (AUS 26m vs USA 340m)
- there are fuck all good examples of nice used guitars that haven't been jacked sky high, cos sellers know shit's rare and there's nothing here.
- pretty much all the good stuff has been or has to be imported. (hello used japanese market)
At least you don't have to deal with this. Wanna trade?
 

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Well I'm sorry to all the small businesses in America but I can't afford to buy from you any more. The cost of shipping is beginning to outweigh the cost of whatever I'm buying. Louis Dejoy is killing your business.

Dejoy sucks but the downfall began well before him. The rot is in the ideological movement to dismantle all public/goverment services in the US. And, it's going to happen, no doubt now.
 
At least you don't have to deal with this. Wanna trade?
- CAD dollar is stronger
- your wages are better
- more affordable housing / rent
- you don't have fucking droughts where it simply just doesn't rain for hundreds of days.
- yes you get snowed in, but at least your houses are actually engineered properly for the conditions.
our building codes are a joke. the houses built here are some of the most shoddily poorly regulated crap you'll ever see in a country not considered third world. not that i'd ever be able to afford to buy one.


also, if you can afford to own and live in your own home, basically you can stfu.
 
Louis Dejoy is killing your business.

This started before Dejoy was postmaster, although he definitely hasn't helped.

He is apparently on the way out, for what it's worth, but I'm not suggesting things are going to get any better...
 
Yeah I don't need to pile on to this "shipping to Canada from basically anywhere is shit prohibitively expensive" but I would also definitely be here for a half the cost triple the time shipping option if that's somehow on the menu
 
- yes you get snowed in, but at least your houses are actually engineered properly for the conditions.
our building codes are a joke. the houses built here are some of the most shoddily poorly regulated crap you'll ever see in a country not considered third world. not that i'd ever be able to afford to buy one.
Solidarity with most of your points but this is not always true, I live in one of the coldest capital cities in the world and I once clocked the water coming out of my bathroom faucet (with the taps turned to 100% hot and running for several minutes) at 0.7 C. (Edit: an overpriced apartment)
 
As someone who rarely sees snow I love it! I also like Canada and Canadians (actually most people anywhere are wonderful). Canadians seem to have a very similar sense of humour to Aussies. I'm sure that after a while the novelty of snow wears off, as does the novelty of clear blue skies and extreme heat for three months of the year.

A few years ago I was in Austria to go to a Biathlon and loved every moment of it. It was so cool to be able to go back to a cafe, sit in front of a fire and have a coffee while watching it snow outside. My idea of heaven, coming from a hot dry country. But that idea of heaven obviously didn't involve having to shovel any of that snow or try to drive in it!

My son and his girlfriend bought a house here in Perth last year. Tiny little house at the rear of a small block and it cost a small (well, quite large) fortune which they will be paying back for years. And they were lucky to find anything. It's extremely hard to find a place to rent or buy here in Perth, and very expensive.

Now that I'm basically (involuntarily) retired I don't have the disposable cash any more to pay too much for shipping. I build things and sell them to friends as they want them to allow me to build something else. There is a small circle of guitarists here who play my amps and it's a beautiful thing. They couldn't afford to buy the kind of amps I make if they were built by anyone else. So far I have been able to sell them for enough to cover my costs and buy more parts, etc. But the shipping costs too much to make that viable any more.
 
Apparently Aussies and Canadians have the same head of state. Not that anyone would notice...
We should do a temporary house swap so you get to enjoy Canadian winter while we swelter in your heat and get killed by your local fauna.
 
t's funny how people from outside Australia think it's so dangerous here. I've hardly ever been killed by our wildlife. Although a friend of mine was once in intensive care for 36 hours after being bitten by a dugite. He's still the only person I know of who has been bitten by a snake. And I did once see a tiger snake slither past my foot while I was photographing at a lake once. Glad it didn't bite - tiger snakes are nasty.
 
Nope, Musikding decides what they carry. I suggested they offer the standalone PCBs a couple years ago but I think their primary source of income comes from the kits. Maybe if enough folks requested them?
Good to know, I'll drop them a message! Although I do wonder if they'd only take the older, most popular ones, and not the new ones I'm more interested in... Oh well, won't hurt to ask.
t's funny how people from outside Australia think it's so dangerous here. I've hardly ever been killed by our wildlife. Although a friend of mine was once in intensive care for 36 hours after being bitten by a dugite. He's still the only person I know of who has been bitten by a snake. And I did once see a tiger snake slither past my foot while I was photographing at a lake once. Glad it didn't bite - tiger snakes are nasty.
For the record, the only dangerous part about wildlife in Finland is pretty much a moose running in front of your car, causing a crash. That's it. There's an adder that lives in Finland, and it is venomous, but like ~100 people get bit per year and last time a person died from it was in 1998 I think. Not much else is dangerous, maybe if you manage to get in between a momma bear and the cubs (but I don't think that happens in practice, they stay away from humans). Mosquitos are annoying though.

Oh, and I think there are highly venomous spiders (Chilean recluse spiders) in this one building owned by the Natural History Museum in Helsinki, but they're apparently very skittish and hide from humans. Obviously they came with some museum-related shipment years ago and just... stayed?

And for the record, the most annoying part about driving in winter IMO is clearing the snow and heating the car before you get going, the actual driving part isn't usually too bad (maybe it's worse higher north). With winter tires, it's not too bad 98% of the time, and the snow clearing services work quite well. There's a few days per year where it sucks and is very slippery, with heavy snowfall they can't always clear it out before you need to go somewhere, but you get used to it and drive carefully when it's worse than usual.
 
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Good to know, I'll drop them a message! Although I do wonder if they'd only take the older, most popular ones, and not the new ones I'm more interested in... Oh well, won't hurt to ask.
At least on one occasion I was able to buy a PCB only, even though it wasn't listed on the website. I just sent an email and asked. Took a while because he back-ordered it, but it got here eventually. Price was about the same as if I had ordered it myself from the US (after taxes and all). It was an Aion FX board.
 
I used to be able to eat the $15-25 shipping fee to Europe for a bunch of boards or a tube pedal (plus 25% import taxes and VAT) but somebody tell Curtis Novak that a flat fee of $65 to ship pickups to Europe, regardless of how many, is ridonculous :)

Anyway I also have to stop because on top fo the costs, the paperwork has become a hassle. I just got a SushiBoxFX pedal from Nathan. He shipped it right away, it arrived in Warsaw in less than 10 days and then languished at customs for weeks while I sent various docs, then Nathan had to send me a declaration of conformity with safety regulations, and then I had to give the post office power of attorney and then I missed the delivery. One month. I don't even remember what the pedal does now :)

Edit I live in Kraków. Warsaw is ewwwww
 
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I have been doing diy a long time now and when I got into it there weren't as many vendors, projects available and resources. When switched from kits to sourcing my own parts in 2017/2018 prices and shipping were generally lower and I had access to a lot more parts. Between inflation, shipping costs, pandemics, war zones and more people joining the hobby the availability of certain parts, costs and especially shipping have made building less fun for me. The past couple years have also been slow in new project releases. A large majority of pcbs released have been revisions and new layouts of existing projects, or just the newest flavor of yats. I tried to keep it fresh by exploring projects that weren't available but I'm out of that at this point. Good luck to everyone still deep in the trenches. I'm tapped out. Maybe when there is enough new projects and I can plan a handful of builds I'll dip a toe in the pool again, but until then I'm just gonna keep playing what I got.
 
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t's funny how people from outside Australia think it's so dangerous here. I've hardly ever been killed by our wildlife. Although a friend of mine was once in intensive care for 36 hours after being bitten by a dugite. He's still the only person I know of who has been bitten by a snake. And I did once see a tiger snake slither past my foot while I was photographing at a lake once. Glad it didn't bite - tiger snakes are nasty.
 
Ha! Redback spiders are everywhere. I see them regularly, although surprisingly haven't seen one recently. A few years back I needed the bathroom in the middle of the night and don't turn the light on in our bedroom to avoid disturbing my wife. As I walked into the bathroom I felt something land on my head so casually brushed it off with my hand. As in turned on the bathroom light I looked down and it was a big fat redback on the floor. I must have walked through the doorway just as it was dropping down from the ceiling. But I don't know anyone who has been bitten.
 
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I have been doing diy a long time now and when I got into it there weren't as many vendors, projects available and resources. When switched from kits to sourcing my own parts in 2017/2018 prices and shipping were generally lower and I had access to a lot more parts. Between inflation, shipping costs, pandemics, war zones and more people joining the hobby the availability of certain parts, costs and especially shipping have made building less fun for me. The past couple years have also been slow in new project releases. A large majority of pcbs released have been revisions and new layouts of existing projects, or just the newest flavor of yats. I tried to keep it fresh by exploring projects that weren't available but I'm out of that at this point. Good luck to everyone still deep in the trenches. I'm tapped out. Maybe when there is enough new projects and I can plan a handful of builds I'll dip a toe in the pool again, but until then I'm just gonna keep playing what I got.
I'm mainly chasing sounds these days. I don't tend to make pedals just for the sake of it. I do buy PCBs from time to time (Sorry Robert!) but mainly only those I think sound like I could modify them.
 
I'm mainly chasing sounds these days. I don't tend to make pedals just for the sake of it. I do buy PCBs from time to time (Sorry Robert!) but mainly only those I think sound like I could modify them.
I stopped chasing my core tone with pedals and just built the Marshall so my chase is over lol pedal gain won't cut it and I have built the best options for boosts. May you find what you're looking for🙏
 
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