It isn’t easy finding good vendors in this email/web world. You can’t look in the warehouse, or their shop. There is no way to check their alley for how they handle their mistakes.

My father was a great mechanic, actually an aeronautical engineer who loved having “worked his way up” from a drafting table. He passed one test onto me, since he knew that I would never be a mechanic, too distracted by how things looked.. He taught me to look in the trash for what is thrown away, to look in the shop for what and how it is kept. A good shop is easy to work in, to walk around in. Check the mechanic’s tool box.

If he doesn’t care for his tools, he will not care for your machine.

What does this mean to the artist, how does this apply to the studio? Let me respond glibly, the way he would have:

if you can’t understand that, then you haven’t understood this.