I’ve put off saying this for about ten years, but it’s gotten to be too much. “Sorry” to you good gunsmiths. I know you’re out there. I’d say that you know who you are, and I’m sure you do, but the problem is; the bad ones also think they’re the good ones. They’re super good, even. That’s always the way it works. I began to realize this some time in the 1970s when I was in the early stages of my career as a musical instrument mechanic with an alternate career as a live sound mixer (“technician” or “engineer”, respectively, for those who feel it needs to sound exciting and hard to reach).
The really smart sound engineers could quote you all the specs of every piece of gear they had. They could recite from memory the center frequencies of all 31 bands of a graphic equalizer, for example. After they had everything all set up and the system response tweaked using the pink noise generator with the front-of-house EQs, monitor EQs and active crossovers, when the performance actually started (which is when the real job of actually making it all sound good actually begins) they’d turn around satisfied, sit down, and have a sandwich and a little chat about sweet nothings. Man, those guys were really smart, and they often made sure everyone around them understood that they were smart. Why, they went to college, and stuff, don’t you know?
It seems we get an inordinate proportion of failed or stalled UltiMAK mount installations, an inordinate number of misunderstandings of how the system works, from, you guessed it– gunsmiths.
Apparently, they know and understand far too much to be bothered with reading and following the instructions. Even when they contact me about this or that perceived problem, they are too smart to accept my explanations. They, you see, understand mechanics better than the person who designed the system, built the first prototypes using hand tools and common power tools in a musical instrument shop, did the majority of testing, wrote most of the patent claims, and used the system for over ten years. They tell me all the reasons why it can’t possibly, ever work, why my hands-on experience is wrong, why the experience of over ten thousand users of a single model is all wrong, and how I’m being a dumb jerk for suggesting they might just go ahead and follow the simple instructions to the letter anyway and then see how it goes.
Since an inordinate number of damaged mounts have come from such gunsmiths also (again, because they are smarter and more experienced) I have to wonder how many of them go on to become politicians, city administrators, professors, or left wing community organizers. There is an uncanny set of parallels.
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