RoyRapoport
New Member

Registered: Jan 2003
A High Watermark in Customer Service

John Jardine has spoiled me for life.

Background:
I have a friend who, due to being introduced to shotguns from the wrong end at an early age, is in a wheelchair. One of the problems he has is that his grip strength in his left hand is pretty low. In preparation for a fairly intensive 4-day handgun class at the end of January he purchased a Kimber Pro Carry II and found that he was having problems racking the slide using the standard hold for a righty. We thought may be we could somehow add some sort of T-bar to the back of the slide so when his hand slipped toward the rear of the slide it would press against the bar instead of slipping off the gun. Knowing that this sort of custom thing can take a while, we figured the chances of getting something done in this short of a time period (3-4 weeks) were low, but what the heck. Given that I've heard good things of John Jardine (of Valtro fame) and he's local, we gave him a call. This is the timeline of what happened:

12/31/2002 (New Year's Eve): I call John. We start talking and talk for about an hour. He expresses enthusiasm for the project, though he's concerned he may not be able to get to it in time, as he's preparing for the SHOT show and has some backed up work. He brainstorms some ideas and we agree to meet at a local range on Friday so we can discuss this in person with Mike present.

1/3/2003 (+3 days from beginning): We meet John at the range and talk for about an hour about possibilities. He comes up with the idea of replacing the stock sight (which he says occasionally breaks because it's thin at a certain point) with a new sight machined with the T-bar. This will result in no modification of the gun itself. He is infinitely patient. He suggests giving him about two weeks and calling him back. We do not discuss what the cost of the sight will be.

1/7/2003 (+7 days): John calls Mike and lets him know he finished making the sight; he'd like us to come by and see what we think.

1/8/2003 (+8 days): We come to John's. John is gracious enough to allow us to come after business hours and we spend about two hours at his place talking about the gun and his impressions of it. This is despite the fact we're supposed to go meet up with Mike's girlfriend -- as we joked about in the car, the problem with John talking about 1911s is that you don't *WANT* to stop him from talking. He's absolutely fascinating to talk to. John has, by the way, finished the sight (though not bead-blasted it yet, so it's a bit shiny). It's beautiful (more below). When Mike asks him about price, John tells him that he can't afford to pay what the sight actually cost to make -- turns out John was working on it most of the weekend. Gotta be difficult to be a perfectionist. End result: The sight is free. Meanwhile, Mike's trying to get John to tell him what else he'd recommend to have done to the gun, but John fairly strongly suggests that he go to the class first, and there is no need to spend a whole bunch of money on it. In his words, "I'm not doing this so I can reach into your pocket." Finally, Mike persuades him to do the standard reliability work (tuning the trigger and extractor, polishing, etc, and removing a point on the gun that was rubbing Mike's palm to bleeding) and replacing the safety with a low-slung safety because Mike has problems keeping his thumbs on the safety while shooting. We leave John's on Wednesday, at about 9pm.

1/10/2003 (+10 days): John calls Mike and lets him know he's finished.

I picked up the gun today. Here are some pictures of the sight:

John charged us an extremely reasonable rate for the reliability work and the safety (and its fitting) and, as I mentioned, did not charge us for the sight. Throughout this process he was always incredibly patient with our questions, thorough in his explanations of his decisions and preferences, and almost violently opposed to doing more work for us than he thought was necessary . We got a custom-made part (and some more work) ten days after starting to talk about it. This is, in my opinion, a perfect customer service experience. I cannot rave enough about John, the quality of his work, and his treatment of us, his customers. There is not a single thing I can point to as the smallest blemish on this
experience.

Wow.

-roy