Faulty pencil unit, but great service for replacement.

I recently made a pencil from an Axminster gunmetal pencil kit (200354) all went well until a day later I tried to use the eraser and when pulling the cap off the entire cartridge came apart. I filled in a return request online and got a full replacement set the next day, great service from Axi.

Now I'm left with all the spare parts for the pencil, except the actual cartridge. Does anyone know if or where I can buy a replacement unit to save scrapping the kit parts ? There's absolutely no identification on the unit itself.

The kit you bought is actually made by a company called Rizheng in China, (or possibly one called Ace, which amounts to the same thing) which is the same company that virtually all of the eBay and penkit-dot-whatever sellers buy from. Anyone can buy from Rizheng and resell the goods on the open market, it's just that Axminster re-brand theirs as CraftPro.

Have a trawl through the eBay sellers to see if one of them carries the pencil insert, however, you may find that you'll have to pay almost as much for the insert as a spare part as you paid for the kit in the first place, so you are possibly better off just putting the left over bits an the ubiquitous spares box - they've cost you nothing anyway and they will come in handy one day for sure. Every pen maker needs to delve into the contents of their spares box sooner or later.

My spares box is enormous, too true.

Peter.

Phil Dart said:

The kit you bought is actually made by a company called Rizheng in China, (or possibly one called Ace, which amounts to the same thing)../..
you may find that you'll have to pay almost as much for the insert as a spare part as you paid for the kit in the first place,

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Thanks for that pointer. I'd worked out that most of the offerings were all coming out of the same factory. Nice to have the source detail.
It's certain looking that shipping is an issue in getting any spares. Not yet found anyone selling individual parts with economic single part shipping, but still waiting to hear what Rizhang will ship for directly. It will be interesting to see the out of factory prices and see if it's worth buying direct. It doesn't look like Axi are making huge profits from these kits.

Interesting Axminister review said they not supplied with any lead.

Both my original and replacement had several leads in the units, so don't take too much notice of a single review like that.

APH said:

It doesn't look like Axi are making huge profits from these kits.

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You will find that Axi will be buying large quantities and also having a buying agreement so they will get a much greater discount than any of us on here could even dream of.

It's where many of the large suppliers win over but then there is many .com "bedroom" business that sell cheaper as they don't have the large overheads but buy large enough quantities to get them priced right.

Dayacom is another supplier but they do minimum order quantities of 500's at a time.

They do low MOQ for some kits, but the price is hiked for that privilege.

silver said:

You will find that Axi will be buying large quantities and also having a buying agreement so they will get a much greater discount than any of us on here could even dream of.

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The Rizheng site lists standard discounts up to 999 units, even at the highest volume discount is only about 7%. How many do we think Axi would order in one go ? even at 5k I doubt they'd get any more than 15%.
They also have the costs of shipping, duty, storage, printing and repackaging, cost of replacing faulty units. It all adds up.

APH said:

The Rizheng site lists standard discounts up to 999 units, even at the highest volume discount is only about 7%. How many do we think Axi would order in one go ? even at 5k I doubt they'd get any more than 15%.
They also have the costs of shipping, duty, storage, printing and repackaging, cost of replacing faulty units. It all adds up.

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I agree that there is a lot of overheads and Axi will know what each item is costed at before they even put them on the shelf, when items go on sale even if they give 50% discount. Believe me they are still making a profit.

I believe you will find those discounts won't apply to Axi or any other bulk buyer, they are discounts for the likes of us and the.com revolution.

Certainly if I was the buyer I wouldn't be buying at those discounted rates.

They do work well for group buys, similar to CS USA as it works out worthwhile for a group to get together and then have the power of bulk buy pricing.

But the issue of faulty goods does tend to fall on the bulk supplier as it's generally expected that they take some of the risk. Unless of coarse there is a major design fault and high failure rate as I would expect that to written in to the supply agreement.