Flexcabs Update - Patrick Toomey

[bill_lumley]

Well I guess it is time for this project to come out of the closet as I have seen a few folks here asking about it . As of yesterday there is NO working program a short few months after the original commitment . Patrick has since disconnected his forum so even his current 'beta' users can not communicate with each other or him . He has also disconnected the answering machine on the phone number given on his web site .

It would appear the shopbot crowd is ripe for this kind of fraud as it is by nature a very trusting and helpful bunch of folks . I have been pleased with every bit of support I have gotten from Shopbot and this community . It is just a real shame when someone drops in and feels they can prey on us for financial gain as was also demonstrated earlier with the guy selling hardware platform upgrades that never delivered .

It makes me sad to report this news here but I thought any prospective clients should be warned that this appears to be another fraud on this community .

The search continues for a reasonably priced cabinet parts program . It would appear Shopbot wants to enter this space with it's recent hiring of a cabinet maker who wrote such a program but there has been no news there either about upgrading that program to meet user requirements .

Bill

[richards]

That's too bad. We could use several variations of cabinet type software. Few people who have not actually written large programs have any idea how hard it is to write a market-ready program. I've started writing some cabinet software several times, but the permutations seem to be almost endless. Writing a simple program that forces everyone to do things 'my way' is difficult enough, but allowing everyone to do things 'your way' would take a lot more skill than I have.

There is a very good reason why the only 'big' software packages for cabinet design and tool pathing cost as much - or more - than the Shopbot itself. It takes a long time to write the code and a long time to test things out. Anyone with even a little business sense knows that costs have to be passed along to the customer. Even though the Shopbot customer base is fairly large, it seems that very few have either the inclination or the resources to buy a license to a top notch cabinet program.

Ryan's Cabinet Parts Pro does a very good job for what it was designed to do, but it doesn't follow the European model that I use. That seems to be the 'problem' with all of the 'affordable' programs. They work very well as long as your idea of how a cabinet should be built and the programmer's idea of how a cabinet should be built are the same.

I would imagine that Patrick is still working full time on the program. He doesn't seem to be the kind of guy that would purposely cheat anyone. However, those of us who have spent years as programmers know all too well that the last 10% of the code takes 90% of the project's time.

[bill_lumley]

Mike , many of his beta testers are software skilled people including myself . I spent my career managing very large software projects that would make Flexcabs look like a walk in the park. On many occations we gave him the benefit of the doubt and told him how hard we thought it was . Nobody ever slammed him for being late . But we did ask him to communicate with us and his pattern was to only communicate when bothered by someone . His last comminication was 2 weeks ago and was done when a beta tester would not hang up the phone with him until he posted to the group .

He may not have intended to cheat us but that has is how it has turned out . The facts bear that out . One fellow asked for a refund and Patrick said he would look into it and he never heard back from him .....

Bill

[dray]

I think he may have just bitten off more than he could chew.

How many shopbotters actually bought the Flexicabs?

I have gotten used to cabinet parts pro. It only does the basic boxes then I have a folder of "canned parts" that I import as dxf's to add into any cabinet or cabinet part as needed.

[richards]

Bill,
Your expertise with software is needed. Go for it! If you can write the code then you'll have dozens, if not hundreds, of Shopbotters knocking at your door. The trick, of course, is to make a sub-$1000 package that actually works. Honestly, I can't do it and I don't know anyone who can - given the fact that the market might be 100 licenses. To a competent software programmer, the fees collected would amount to just a few days work AND, I would imagine that this type of project is a lot more than just a few days work.

[dray]

I would pay up to around $2500 or so.

I just cant see paying $15k for a software package. Im not cheap, Im just "thrifty" lol

If someone was to do actual market research I'll bet that there is much larger market than sme might think.

[bill_lumley]

Danny , I figure there at least 20 people that contributed to this science project of Patricks .
Hey I think maybe with that cash he could have just gone out and bought the KCDW CNC software and be done with it .

I may end up with Cabinet parts pro but I want to think this through before blowing some more cash on this ... Cutlist Plus is also an option with DXF support now .

Mike , if I could do it I would but I have other things on my plate at the moment that generate a more reliable source of cash . I have had enough of software in my day and wanted to do other more tangible things so I started a small cabinet making venture . There are too many challenges for an individual to release a complex software program . Everyone sympathizes with Patrick on this front BUT we wish Patrick would show some sympathy to us and give us back our money as he has apparently hit a brick wall and CAN NOT deliver . This is the decent thing to do ....

$300 is a bit steep for a program that does not work and the proprietor has gone AWOL . This is called fraud where I come from .

[richards]

Danny,
Maybe I'm just getting old and crotchity, but I believe that a 'shoestring' budget to develop a workable cabinet program that is really parametric would start at around $250,000. Without any 'handholding', that would require a guaranteed minimum user base of 1,000 Shopbotters to just cover the development costs. When you add in 'training/handholding/telephone' time of 10 hours per licence and a realistic cost per hour of at least $100 for a competent programmer who could actually answer 'newby' questions, you reduce the dollars allocated to the developer to $1,500 per license - which would require 166 licenses to be sold. Then, when you add in the cost of marketing/commissions to actually sell the product at $1,000 per license, the developer would end up with about $500 per license. That means that 500 licenses - minimum - would have be to sold just to recover costs. There may well be 500 Shopbotters out there who would pay $2,500 for a license, but I don't know who they are. When I offered a belt-drive transmission kit to Alpha users to elimitate 'chatter' for $750 I didn't get one single sale. There were dozens of Shopbotters that asked if I would be willing to 'give' them the plans or to 'give' them hints on what to do, but not one Shopbotter thought that eliminating 'chatter' was worth $750. Well, long story short, I 'gave' away many sets of drawings and swallowed the $10,000 in actual costs that I paid out to find a workable solution. My take on the Shopbotter community is that, when it comes time to lay down the money, that we're a very thrifty lot.

Edited:
Bill, you posted while I was composing. I totally agree with you that Patrick should either refund the money or produce the promised product. That is the honest and ethical thing to do. On the other hand, would anyone with real programming experience expect to be able to buy a full featured program for $300 or $3,000 or even $30,000? The dearth of software on the market makes me think that only a few brave souls have been willing to offer 'any' kind of cabinet software.

[bakerkr]

Hi all -

I think I'm the guy Bill is talking about. I called Patrick a few weeks ago to find out why we haven't heard anything from him, he seemed "surprised". I told him he had just about everyone screaming for an update and that he needed to look at the forum immedately. While I had him on the phone, I expressed my desire for a refund, as his project had gone way over the original delivery date and what he had given us wasn't anything other than a stupid database. He said he would look into it and like before I heard nothing. I contacted PalPay and hope they can offer some help or at least cut his account off.

Bottom line - This guy has stolen our money and I doubt he will be "man" or american enough to do the right thing here. My lesson from this - ask for a working demo and/or documentation (and pray my wife never asks about that software I "just had to purchase").

Patrick - enjoy the Margarita.

Kevin

[edp]

Well, add me to the group of trusting people who plunked down the $300 for the program - There is probably more than one person out there who will be annoyed enough with Mr. Toomey take a little vacation to Florida and put things right. This is a possibility that most con artists don't consider, but Toomey should start refunding the money. The foul karma he has generated will roast him when he least expects it.

[richards]

As a bit of friendly advice to those who might think that writing software - on someone else's dime - is a good way to start a profitable business, let me just say that it very rarely happens. The traditional way of offering a new product is to pay someone a handsome amount of money to do market research to see if your idea is viable. Then, assuming that you're a competent programmer that doesn't receive unlimited handouts from the likes of Bill Gates, you contact a lawyer and accountant and a banker to advise you on the prospects of starting a business to offer a software product. Assuming that the lawyer, the accountant and the banker all agree that you have a 'great new product', then you either dig deep into your own pockets to fund the new idea, or you form a company and sell stock to those who believe in your idea. In all cases, you DON'T pre-sell the software to the general public. That's the mark of a 'newby' to the business world. It's just not an accepted way of doing business.

That sword cuts both ways. If only an inexperienced programmer would offer unwritten software at a fixed price, only inexperienced buyers would pay out their money to buy non-existant software. There still is no such thing as a 'free lunch'. Somebody always has to pay the bill.

[jseiler]

Mike,

I would understand and agree with your position if that was the way things went down, but that's not the case. I don't know if you recall this thread:

http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/messages/312/18000.html

This thread is where Patrick stated he had a working program and it just needed a little cleaning up. That's why so many of us bought into it, because we believed it already existed (mostly).

Mike, I agree, if I thought I was helping to fund a ground zero full development with my $300, I wouldn't have even considered it, having done software in the past and knowing he was mostly drawing from a relatively small shopbot community.

I hope he's just a flakey programmer guy who can't be bothered answering his phone and fixing a down server, but I would never bet money on that at this point. Many of us bought into this idea of Patrick's because of his good reputation in the shopbot community.

John

[richards]

John,
I'm quite familier with those posts and with eCabinets. I suspect that many of you, just like me, has a copy of eCabinets from Thermwood. We all know that eCabinets is proprietary to Thermwood and that it doesn't work with any other machine. (I also know that several people bought a Thermwood just because of eCabinets. It is very good software for making cabinets.) When I saw that Patrick was using eCabinets as a 'front end' for his program I just figured that he had found a way to exploit some of the features of eCabinets without violating the Copyright. Then, I looked at the list of 'features' that Patrick listed for his software and realized that it was time for me to turn off the computer, turn out the lights, and walk away from programming because I had to admit that I was totally outclassed. There was no way that I could ever offer that number of features in a $300 product even if the market included 50% of all Shopbotters.

I would suspect that anyone else who has ever written software for a living would have had thoughts similar to mine. We know what can be done on the cheap and what takes real effort. (My portion of a doors program is something that can be done of the cheap - PLEASE don't take this as a slam against Bruce Clark; his front-end to my rudimentary door program made his FreeDoors version something that has real value while my contribution required someone to enter a bunch of data into a spreadsheet and then process that data to produce SBP files). Somehow, in reading Patrick's postings, I thought that he was still at the spreadsheet processing stage. Maybe I totally mis-read his posts.

Six months is not an unreasonable amount of time for someone to 'clean up' some software. My portion of the doors program took longer than that to go through all of the versions before things started to work as expected. I would say that Patrick just needs time.

Eating sour grapes only gives one a sour stomach. Three hundred dollars is hardly more than the cost of four sheets of plywood or four or five decent cutters. A lot of us ruin more than $300 a day when we make a mistake in a design. It's never pleasant to throw away money, but $300 is only three or four hours billing. Surely the world won't stop revolving for $300.

[beacon14]

Personally I would have at least felt a little better if Patrick had just come clean with us and admitted that for whatever reason the project wasn't working out the way he expected it to, the money had been long spent, and he would neither be able to produce the product or come up with refunds.

Of course the honorable thing to do would have been to contact each of us, explain the situation, ask for more time and/or work out some kind of repayment schedule. I know people who have gone to jail for taking deposits on jobs and then closing their business without offering refunds. (Well, one person anyway.) I don't suppose this is what's in store for Patrick but I do believe that what goes around comes around and he will suffer much more than I will without my $300.

I must admit to being one of the inexperienced buyers but if Patrick had not been "one of us" I probably would not have bought in. I still do not believe he intentionally swindled us but that he probably ran into problems with the developers he was trusting to supply the nesting routines (or something like that) and ran out of steam and money. I wish I could say this is the first mistake I've ever made that cost me $300 but alas that is not the case. Live and learn.

[hyrum_r]

Sad as this is, I'm not really surprised to hear this at all. Everything about Flexcabs looked too good to be true for the price he was asking for it. I'm now on about my 4th attempt to write some cabinet software. Like Mike said, I ran into the problems of an almost endless list of possibilities for different construction techniques, etc.

This time, I'm scaling way back on my software and just writing it to suit MY needs for right now. If someone else happens to build cabinets the same way I do, then good luck for them. I really, really wish there was an affordable cabinet solution for the Shopbot that would work exactly as each of us would like it to, but I haven't found one, not even KCDw from what I've been going through just getting the cutlists right.

[ron_varela]

After reading this post I do not defend Patrick but have to give him the benefit he had the right intentions for what ever reason.
Anything is possible, did he bite off more then he can chew, did he make promises he could not keep, did he scam everyone or did something happen that is out of his control.
I for one know the pressure one endures by trying to do the right thing only to find out everyone is counting on the promise one makes.
Patrick might show back up with good news or bad news or never show up at all, one can only hope that he keeps his word.
I myself gave my word that I will spend the rest of my life helping any shopbotter and I have done my best in the last 10 years doing so.
Some say I do it for profit some say I do it because I care; I say I do it because it makes me feel good knowing I have helped someone else.
Patrick had a good idea and ran with it because everyone counted on having the program, only he knows what happened and why he vanished, maybe he got hurt like me and is in the hospital; maybe he is having material problems or problems at work or he is at a loss where to go at this point with everyone counting on him to finish.
I just hope he comes back one day to inform everyone that pitched in for the project with some kind of news, if not then this forum endures the pain of broken promises.

Ron

[jseiler]

I'd have a lot easier time swallowing the fact that Patrick made a mistake about the scope of the project if he took down the ordering page from the flexcabs website when he took down the phone and webforum. I wasn't curious enough to actually spend another 300, but I clicked all the way through the ordering process up to paypal confirmation.

Anyone mail him a check? That will bring the postmaster general's postal inspectors into it. Paypal is harder to get legal traction with.

Can one write off a lack of refund as uncollectable debt? If so, everyone can have fun making sure that patrick gets to pay the irs for each and every copy he sold and didn't deliver.

Sometimes the best karma is putting your boot where the sun doesn't shine.

John
-- who's got the 10 1/2?

[richards]

Let's see if I understand this whole thing. Patrick pre-sold $6,000 worth of software that he hasn't yet delivered. He's been working on that software for about 6-1/2 months. Where I live that means he's been working for about 143 days. At 8 hours per day, he's put in about 1,144 hours - for $6,000 - or $5.24 per hour. That should guarantee top notch, first class work. All of us should feel privileged to work for $5.24 an hour.

I'm sure that none of us ever missed a deadline before. I'm sure that none of us ever estimated a job at $300 for 4 hours work and then found that the job actually took 6 hours and cost the customer $450. What did we do? Did we just eat the extra $150 or did we tell the customer that some things are just out of our control - and then hand them the bill for $450? Maybe if everyone just found a bigger stick to beat Patrick with he would work harder and faster and better.

What happened to this community? Everyone keeps saying that he's one of us. Well, then, lets start acting like it. Patrick, I don't know much about what you're doing, but I do have some minor experience programming. If you need a hand, let me know. If I can help you through this, I would consider it a privilege.

-Mike

[hyrum_r]

I believe also that Patrick had the right intentions to start with, but he just got in way over his head. The best thing for him to do would be to at least post some message here telling us what's going on. As others have said, it's not the fact that he's missed a deadline that's the problem; it's like he dropped off the face of the earth, and no one knows for sure what's going on.

[beacon14]

As I said I long ago wrote off the $300 but if he took our money and left us hanging then he is NOT one of us after all. All I was asking for was an honest assessment of where he stands. If he had just come clean I would have forgiven him. I feel badly that he spent untold hours trying to make good on his promises but I have little compassion for someone who hides from his commitments.

Last summer I spent 2 weeks and $1,500 in materials re-making a wall unit that did not come out to the customer's (and my own) standards. That cost me $8,000 in time and materials in order to protect my honor and reputation. And unfortunately it wasn't the first time I've spent weeks of unpaid labor making good on my promises. But I can sleep well at night and feel good knowing that when I tell someone I'm going to do something I do it, even if it takes longer than I thought it would, in which case I let the customer know what is going on - they usually understand and appreciate the fact that I am going out of my way to make good on the job.

[jseiler]

anyway, lets stick to facts.

1) patrick said he had software that worked, cut and nested, and was in fact, in use.

2) patrick offered beta copies for sale at a 200 discount. he was looking for 500 for the release version. the 200 discount was mutually beneficial.

3) all versions up to the last one (1.15) have no usable nesting, cutting or editting functions. its not just buggy, it doesn't produce cnc code of any sort, doesn't allow editting, crashes while moving between screens. the ui barely progressed over the 6 months.

4) patrick did not update his website to reflect postponed release dates.

5) patricks account is still collecting money.

6) there were at least 20 shopbot customers. probably a lot more from cnczone.

7) patrick promised docs, delivered a 4 paragraph post. patrick promised a questionaire for us to fill out describing our cabinet practices. never delivered.

8) THE IMPORT FUNCTION WAS NEVER DELIVERED! none. not excel, not ecabs, not anything. the main simple function was never delivered.

9) 4 months. after he boasted, and before he said he had working betas, he had two months. he spent that time coming up with a slick website with screens that look nothing like we ever saw, except if you squint a lot, the input screen looks similar. he certainly didn't spend it writing code

10) no one ever received a "beta" of the program. we only received "alphas" of the user interface.

I don't know if patrick's motives were pure or not. Its clear the software was never as done as he said.

let's get back to holding hands and singing shop-bot-yah

John

[dray]

I didnt buy the software and I am unsure of his intent.

I did email him quite a few times about the software but he never got back to me.

Kudos Dave!

I have done the same thing many times, rush through a job because of pressure then look at it in a different light and trash it and do it again (after calling the customer to come to the shop and watch me tear it down). It means more to me that I can look at myself in the morror or sleep at night.

[thewoodcrafter]

With Patrick's forum down it looks like we were had. I was really looking forward to this program. I guess that is what all con-men rely on, greed. Because I will never spend $12,000 for KCDW. I still need a solution to my cabinet cutting problems.

Is it possible that anyone else can complete the program?
What about you Richard? Can anything be done with what we have so far?

[richards]

Roger,
For the features that are expected and for the size of the probable Shopbot customer base, a $12,000 cabinet program is totally underpriced.

Somehow we've gotten the idea that software has no value. How many of us spend the majority of our time designing parts and writing cut files? When my Alpha is not cutting, I'm not making any money. No, I don't own KCDW, but I've probably paid for it ten times over in lost revenue and machine downtime while I fiddled with files. My competitors have efficient design software, so the cabinet market in my area won't pay for design time. It's just part of the cost of doing business. If I really want to be in the cabinet industry, I'll have to buy some software that gets me into the game and that might be a poor business descision.

[mgcain]

While I'm new to cabinetmaking, I have been doing commercial software development for 25 years. Patrick started an ambitious project, and made the classic mistake of letting the cat out of the bag before it was ready. I think he may have been overwhelmed by the response and the requests for changes. If he misrepresented what the software does, then shame on him. I've known more than one software developer that sold what the software "will" do vs. what it currently does.

That being said, I started a project in January to provide a "simple" program that could cut square cabinet parts, import a cutlist from eCabinets and generate a nest. I talked with Roger Kirkpatrick about this and he provided me some valuable input and volunteered to test some files for me when the time was right. At about that time, Patrick's software became all the rage and I decided to put the project on hold to see where it went. Roger let me know last night about what has happened with Patrick's software, so I will resurrect the project on the following basis:

I can't start programming in earnest until August. Its a part time venture, so it will take some time to get something minimally usable available. Probably 4-6 months. And that is pre-released-what-do-you-think version. I do not want anyone putting money into it until someone from the community deems it does what it says it does, so no risk for you all.

I would probably approach this differently than what has been done in the past. I would prefer to develop this as a web-based application and sell it as low-cost subscription then to distribute software. Distribution lends itself to all kinds of issues and probably could account for why patrick had as many problems as he did.

What I would really like for this community to do is to email me off the forum with your thoughts and requirements for what the program should do. Let me tell you now that you won't get a 3D design application that you will generate nests from. That's the $12000 stuff. You can get a decent 2D and database package that will allow a lot of flexibility in how cabinets are made. that part is not difficult.

Since faith in software developers is in short supply here, I won't ask for any. But if the community wants a package, and has the patience to work with me, I can put a quality program together that will meet our needs.

[handh]

Let me start off saying that I do not think that Patrick was trying to scam us from the start. He might be a great programmer but he knows nothing about customer service.

He ignores questions and comments. He ignores emails and when things got hot in the forum his answer is to just shut it down. Maybe he is so tired that we is not thinking, looks like he had to know that when he did that, the fallout was going to be great. This was the worst thing that he could have done.

All he had to do was to address the questions and most people would be understanding. If he would have said look guys this is going to take a whole lot longer to get it right then people would understand, but everytime that he ever posted was after people kept asking what is going on, then he would make promises that he couldn't keep, we will have a working copy today, tomorrow and maybe after a week we would get another update that really didn't do anything but fixed problems with the prior build. One of the best things I remember was when people were getting mad he said I can put out a working copy today with everything but nesting but if you can wait one more day or so I can have everything working lets take a vote, will take just a few hours to get the update online but lets vote to wait. It took longer to wait for the vote than it would have been to put it online, the reason is he could not have put it online because it wasn't ready then, but he did fool some of us on that one. I voted no to call his bluff, but it was a week later before another update appeared and nothing new was added no nesting.

I think that we are getting off track a little, about if the software is worth the money or not. It might be worth 12,000.00 or more if there were a working program. The problem is very simple, something was promised and not delivered, never a explaination as to why, just promisses.

Just so that I can be on record, I don't mind paying for software, I have invested over 20,000.00 in Cabinet Vision, they want about 21,000.00 more to go from screen to machine, they don't support ShopBot and want make a post processor for it, this is what I have been told. I have other CAD programs costing close to 10,000.00 more, accounting software upgraded every year for the last 17 years comes to over 4000.00 plus numours other softwares, I have easly spent over 50,000.00 dollars for software but maybe I am cheap but I think that I have paid for the things that I have got. I don't think that all of the people here have purchased a ShopBot in the toughts to save money, this had very little to do with my purchase, I purchased my bot because I really believed in the product, the community and most important I believed in Ted and his company. In a business sense, the cost of the bot is a lot more than the machine itself, factor in assembly and learning how to operate the machine and in real numbers the bot is not a cheap machine, it cost gets up real fast, but I and other love the diversity of it and love the community, I was really feed up with poor customer service with other vendors and after attending a ShopBot jamboree, I purchased one for our shop. Was it worth the headaches, if you asked me 2 months after the purchase I would say no, ask me 1 year after the purchase and I am very pleased and would do it again.

I would not call the community cheap and want something for nothing, we just want what we were sold.

Maybe it is like other software that I have, you can get the software fixed if you buy the upgrades, ol but wait we do get free upgrades for life for this program, this is the rewards for testing the program, I do feel rewarded don't all of you, who knows maybe our children can use the software. LOL

[richards]

Mitch,
Your 'subscription service' sounds like a winner. If I understand the concept correctly, you would furnish a web-based service that would enable us to design a set of cabinets via your web site and then spit out the SBP files, for a fee, when we clicked the purchase button. Is that the basic concept?

Assuming that we're talking about the same type of service, you might have come up with a product that would work best with the typical small shop that just can't justify a full featured software package and yet can't compete without having a full featured software package. Of course the devil is in the details. The success of such a venture would depend on how completely you fill the perceived niche and on how you price your service. Working with 100 users who each do one or two kitchens a year wouldn't be much of an incentive to you to spend the time and effort to write the software.

[handh]

I don't know about the web based idea, I don't think that I want to have to rely on the internet to do my files. Lets say that I need to get a job out today but the server is down what would I do. If I have it on one computer and my computer goes down we have another to load the software on and get back running. We live out in the sticks and use satelitte internet, sometimes on sometimes its raining and no service. If the program just cuts square parts and nests we already have a great program that does that and does it good its cabinet parts pro. We need a program with more features one like Patrick promised. Just my 2 cents.

[mgcain]

Mike,
You're close! a subscription service would be a low flat fee per month or something for access to the site - you can make as many files as you want to. The way you were describing it is a transaction-based service, which is slightly different. You need a lot of transactions to make it worthwhile for that model to succeed. A fair subscription model is a low-cost alternative that makes it feasible for everyone.

Jeff,
Web application technology has come a long way, and while there would have to be a backup plan for something that is mission critical like this, I would be comfortable in saying that issues like what you were describing would be rare at most. As far as your internet connectivity, you should be able to do this over a phone line - do you have one of those? ;-)

[handh]

Mitch,

We only have sat. internet, no back up phone line internet, I do agree that it would be rare but I have also been doing this long enough to know to expect the unexpected!! I guess we will wait and see how it works, wish you the best.

[bob]

Hello Everyone: This is my first post. I'm sorry to say that I don't own a ShopBot (yet) but do have another CNC. I've been following the ShopBot Forum for some time and like many of you was quite excited about the "new" Flexcabs software. I too purchased the program and was disappointed to see that our investments seemed to have been more of a "donation." I share the sentiments of those who have said Patrick should close his web site in an effort to preclude further sales. Or, like others have suggested, maybe he is still working on it (wouldn't that be great). I have a feeling that there were more sales of the software than we have guessed. Anyway, in closing I hope that this none Shopbotter (at least so far) will not be unwelcome because I really enjoy reading your posts. Best wishes to you all. In the meantime let's keep hoping...

[ed_lang]

WELCOME Bob!

[ckurak]

Welcome, Bob!

[bob]

Thanks Ed and Charles for your kind welcome! On another note, I'm back to using Cabinet Parts Pro but am having difficulty understanding the rabbeting and dado process. I make my dadoes 1/4" deep x 5/8" wide (both sides to accommodate top and bottom) with a 7/8" dado (the sides, top and bottom) to insert a 1/8" back followed by a 5/8" nailer. I'm thinking CP Pro doesn't have the ability to do all this. If anyone can tell me what it can do in terms of a rabbet and dado and how I would input the commands I would really appreciate it. Thanks and have a great weekend!

[mrgadget]

Bob,

Cabinet Parts Pro does not support dados at the moment. Ryan Patterson wrote the program and now is working at Shopbot. I talked with him about a week ago and he says he is working on implementing this feature into his program. Hope it's put in real soon! You can drop him a line via email or phone thru shopbot's website. I, also, currently have the need to find a cabinet program that does supports dados and rabbets, but have been unable to find one at a reasonable price so far. Hope this helps, and welcome to the forum!

[dray]

Just curious, has anyone that bought flexcabs gotten in touch with Patrick?

I am curious as to what he has to say

[bob]

Thanks Jay. Much appreciated!

[jseiler]

I've not managed. The answering machine rings and rings. website still down. I'm very curious what Patrick has to say.

I wonder if anyone in the kissimmee area wants to see if he's been run out of town?

John

[bcammack]

I shan't post his personal info here, but if you search at www.switchboard.com (http://www.switchboard.com) for his name in FL, no city needed, you can find it for yourself.

[handh]

Here is the government site to report internet fraud. www.ic3.gov (http://www.ic3.gov) if anybody is interested in it. This it the Internet Crime Complaint Center. I guess we all can report him and let the gov find out were he is, since he don't want to talk to any of us.