E-mail status 9/3
Answers to e-mails will continue going out again tomorrow. Between the long weekend, a new work schedule, and my daughter’s first days of pre-school I haven’t had time for e-mails yet this week.
Work on orders and watches are proceeding at a normal pace. Order confirmations are also up to date.
Hope everyone had a good Labor Day weekend!
Upcoming news
In the coming weeks there will be a report on the new coatings that we have experimented with. Before my vacation I mentioned that we had sent out case samples to several companies for super-hard PVD coatings. The best known of these coatings is DLC or Diamond Like Carbon. DLC coating has a hardness of about 2,000 vickers and the other coating a proprietary Titanium based coating has a hardness of 1,000 vickers. The Ti-based coating is more flexible than DLC making it more impact resistant, which can be valuable when you consider that 316L stainless steel has a hardness of about 200 vickers. The Ti coating was the first that I received and its is holding up well. It took a hit from a steel pipe that actually dented the watch but the coating actually is still holding.
The final samples of the LRRP have arrived and are currently being reviewed. I will post pics and send out an update to pre-order customers as soon as we complete our review and get some decent photos taken.
Status Update - Aug. 20th
Computer is now back to normal and I should be running a normal schedule again beginning tomorrow afternoon. (Actually the new computer died later on the 19th. Now finally back up again on another computer. I am assured that the hard drive failure was a freak occurance.)
E-mails and phone calls are now up to date. Please note that receiving an auto-reply will be very important as confirmation that your e-mail wasn’t marked as SPAM. We are now filtering our e-mails and so far its catching a few legitimate e-mails each day as SPAM. So far as I know I am catching all of those messages.
Order confirmations up to date as of August 13th. I should be current on e-mail confirmations by Wednesday of this week. (Please note for orders that shipped on August 19th invoices will have to be e-mailed out. We couldn’t print hard copies of the invoices because the new computer wasn’t ready at that time. Watch orders scheduled for August 16th and 19th will ship Friday.)
As always thanks for your patience.
Site update completed
Phase one of the site update has been completed. The new layout is designed to be easier for customers to navigate by grouping all of the options for each model together on one page. Rather than having the custom watch options on one page and the pre-built options on another I have re-organized the site so that, for example, all of the Sea Fighter’s options are presented together. Over the new few months we will continue streamlining the site so that we can lower the maintenance required and re-focus the site on our watch collection, custom watches, and parts. We hope that you will enjoy the changes. And if you don’t please let us know. 
Also due to the enormous amount SPAM that we receive each day we are forced to filter all of our mail. In the past I used to clean out the SPAM manually so that we minimize the chance that we will miss an e-mail from a customer. Unfortunately the SPAM problem has gotten so bad that we must use a filter. A case in point is that no e-mails have gone out yet because of the time required to go through all of our mail. I was just able to download our e-mail received during vacation earlier today.
For the next 30 minutes or so our e-mail servers will be down so that I can install the filter for our accounts. Filter installation completed as of 3.00 pm EST 8/9/2008. Everything should be back to normal now.
Back in the office
I got back in late on Sunday evening. With the jet lag my availability to answer calls will be limited for a few more days. I will begin working through e-mails again in the next few days.