Northern customer service?
Well, I finally bit the bullet and ordered one of these machines. After reading about this thing for over a year, learning of its shortcomings and fixes, I pulled the trigger during the last sale. I have to say I am starting to regret my decision. Time will tell...
I spent some time cleaning the castings and shimming the unit. I had it all put together and started sharpening a chain. The first thing I noticed was the slop in the "hinge." I have been using the Harbor Freight unit for rocked out chains and the NT unit seemed just about as sloppy. This just didn't seem right, Why bother shimming the vice if the hinge is sloppy? but I started sharpening a chain that contacted a vein of concrete in a yard tree i was bucking.
After the first sharpening, I noticed that I had wildly different cutter sizes, so I started using it like the HF unit, that is, holding it to one side. I made it about halfway around the chain again and the pin in the hinge moved enough that the hinge separated. This caused The spring to push the hinge apart and broke the casting that the pivot pin goes through on the upper part of the grinder
Analysis of the failure revealed several problems. First, the pivot pin was not knurled correctly allowing it to move out of place as the grinder was lowered and raised. This also caused it to pivot on the casting, not the bushing which accounts for the slop. The second flaw was a bubble in the casting of the arm where the pin goes through. Had this casting flaw not existed, it probably wouldn't have disintegrated when the pin came out. I probably would've been able to reassemble and re-knurl the pin, but here I am with a junk grinder several hours of playing around.
Now to the customer service. I called immediately, last Saturday, and talked to a very friendly CSR who gave me a return authorization. She explained that it would be until Monday before someone would e-mail a prepaid shipping label, and it would take about two weeks to turn everything around, and would that be OK? Well, I was leaving for work on Sunday night so I had my wife watch my e-mail for the return label. It never showed.
When I got home on Friday, I called customer service again. This time I got a slightly less friendly CSR who informed me that it was my responsibility to mail the broken item back. I argued that it was a poorly made unit that caused the failure, it didn't even perform its intended function once, and that I did not feel that I was responsible for return shipping. We volleyed back and forth a few times on the issue and she finally agreed to send me a return label "within 24hrs"
Well, here I am, 24hrs later, with a broken grinder and no return label. I guess another call is in order on Monday as the weekend call did not prove to work out so well. I am of the mind at this point to just return the POS. I would too, had I not ordered replacement grinding wheels from Bailey's already.
My local Stihl dealer had one of the Italian jobbies on sale in the low $300 range. After seeing the quality of this unit, I think maybe I should just cut my losses and buy a decent one. I was fully prepared to do some "fine tuning", but I have to say that the $29 HF grinder has proven itself to be a better buy than the NT unit so far. At least the HF completely sharpened some chains.
Stay tuned, I'll let you know how it turns out.