We were contacted by the printing firm and told that many of their employees were
attending some type of service and they would be available to meet Wednesday.
Denver suffered another murderous incident late last week that most of you are aware of.
We will update this page on Wednesday pm.
We met with the printers at 1:45 pm today. They began by explaining that they had not yet completed the large orders that had delayed us before. They will finish those jobs later this week, probably on Thursday. By way of an apology, they will be giving us an additional discount. They will also be able to print the charts separately and will not insist on the whole order being done together, as their bid originally stated. They were emphatic that they were not dropping us in favor of the larger clients.
I was not entirely surprised since I had called their processing shop on Friday with a question about the electronic files. I was transferred to the print shop where they were in overtime. We accepted their new offer but also be began to call other printers in the area in case there is some further delay. Of the four shops contacted only two have gotten back to us with bids. Both of these are much more expensive than the
original bid made by our printers. The current discounts being offered bring the original bid down significantly.
We will continue to look at alternative printing bids. In the mean time, we will have the proofs done and approved. We have been encouraged to check as often as we feel we need to with the shop management on the progress of the work underway and the status of our own order. I will post updates as we get them. We are not happy with any delay but we will do everything possible to speed this along.
I talked at some length to the printers yesterday, ready to turn over
samples of the charts and material for preliminary proofing copies.
What I got was a change of our printing slot. The company was not
unapologetic and explained that in addition to partnering with another
firm, they had received orders from several ex-customers of the old
Hirschfeld Press.
The printing slot they would give us at this point is two to four weeks
out or as they put it, no later than the week of July 16th to start
printing. When I queried about an earlier data for all or a part of the
order, they will make every effort to do that.
We began thinking about other printers but now believe that trying to
find another printer will only cost us time that we can use more
productively and we may not be able to get anywhere near the same price
(with the discounts offered), excellent guarantee and process from
someone else. We will post any good news about the printing slot and
material as they print it if the printers are able to work some of the
material sooner.
We’ll continue to post samples and will have another one shortly.
We’ve been working on several interesting projects and will also post
news on their progress.
We talked at length to our printers both last week and today and together we have fixed another print date (start) of June 12th. They
can not do the 22nd (today) and we were not entirely ready. This makes no one happy, though once again, we will save some cost.
The printers are staying with their estimate of 5-7 days to complete printing and we should begin shipping on or before the 20th of June. We will ship in the sequence that the order was taken. If the print shop has breaks in their sub-contracting, we will have material ready for
them but we cannot ship until all of it is done.
We’ll continue to post samples on the web site as soon as Mitch is back from vacation. The next sample will again be from the Axis OB and will give you an idea of the conditional reinforcements and OB options.
You can download the Axis Conditional reinforcements rules here.
Planning on the table layout and initial setup? Our new sample this week is the first three pages of the TW Axis OB. This includes the Map Layout and References, Theaters and Commands, Preparing for Play, Corp HQ Markers and the first page of the Available Breakdown and Assembly Components. This will be the standard format for coming games and includes the layout for Turning Point maps 107-112 and how they will fit with Total War.
Players will note that this new format was specifically designed to allow games to more easily work together and allow transfers between commands. The Breakdown and Assembly Components page shows a good selection of the breakdown counters for the Axis divisions. Before you call, the BG component counters for the Pz XXs are balanced Battle Groups (Kampfgruppe).
