Small Bear...Seriously seriously NOT impressed

[Melonhead]

So...ive finally assembled all the parts for a dig dug build ive been planning for 6 months or so.  not a cheap build.  sourced parts from PPP and small bear.  first time using small bear and never again.  the vactrol was a bout 4 bucks more than mammoth, everything was more in all honesty.  the shipping took 2x as long as the good folks at pedal parts plus....AND here's the kicker:  after spending 45 bucks on about 30-40 resistors and caps- not a single one was labeled and i am missing a couple resistors.  so my next 3 hours are going to be spent going through all the parts and finding out their values and running by radio shack after that,  because apparently theyre too busy at small bear to label the components of your order.  AWESOME.  Pedal Parts Plus, if they can get more inventory and variety, will have my business everytime.   I just bought some knobs from mammoth so we'll see how they score on my scale of customer service.  your comments are welcome.  anyone else have crappy experiences?  

Melonhead

[mjcyates]

Wow, that's pretty strong. Smallbear is a fine place to buy certain things. I generally buy all resistors and capacitors from Mouser because they are nicely labeled. Smallbear offers several things that the others don't. My business is spread between pedalpartsplus, mammoth, smallbear, and mouser. Sometimes effectsconnection.

[Haberdasher]

I don't order many caps or resistors from ppp, mammoth or sb.  I get mine from mouser, newark or tayda.  smallbear is nice because you can get most everything you need for a project there, but I prefer to order from multiple places to build up stock over time.  If you're only doing one project I can understand your frustration though.

ppp for enclosures  and an odd part if I need one
mammoth I like getting pots there and an odd part if I need one
smallbear has lots of great hard to find parts for pedals including germanium trannies, that is what they're there for IMHO
tayda has lots of great cheap stuff, and they do their best to label everything.  but I check every bag of resistors anyway.
mouser has the mack daddy selection of caps, resistors, trannies, ic's, etc etc
newark is pretty cool too
digikey is supposed to be great too but I don't care for their website so I haven't ever used them

good luck man

[aziltz]

I prefer small bear actually.  its mostly because I order in larger quantities, usually 10 or 25.  for my largest orders, turn around time is about a week and I'm talking $250.

For boxes I go with PPP.  Unfortunately, to have things drilled and powder coated takes about a month, but they do good work and have excellent quality control now.

I haven't ordered from Mammoth in a while, but may go back now that they have BYOC drill patterns.

[jkokura]

I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion. Thank you for sharing yours.

(Moderator hat comes off)

I try to be fair when I approach vendors, but repeated bad experiences get noted by me. In this case, I can understand why it might be frustrating to get a bunch of bags of resistors in various values, but in all honesty that's part of the deal in getting parts. Sometimes you have to check them, and I've gotten bags of resistors that are marked for one value, only to measure them and find their value written was completely wrong.

I agree that sometimes parts cost more at Smallbear than at other sources. Perhaps it would help if you understood some history about these suppliers. Smallbear has been around by far the longest of any pedal specific supplier. Perhaps by as much as 10 years. In that time, Smallbear was just about the only place to go for a ridiculous number of parts that just couldn't be found easily anywhere else. With the rise of the internet in the last ten years, venders have popped up on eBay and opened their own shops. Big companies like Digikey and Mouser have become more accessible to little guys like us. A lot of those common parts can be found for cheaper through some of those places now. This is all new development, and anyone joining in with the DIY stuff now doesn't really see that things are much different now than they used to be. Unfortunately though, the change doesn't really change the guys at Smallbear's costs. I know that with the rise of competition prices often get lowered, but it doesn't make sense to start chopping prices just because a newbie like Mammoth shows up who is under pricing them. They can't 'compete' with places like Tayda based in Asia, so they aren't trying to - actually they don't need to. Many, many, many of the boutique pedal builders use them as their suppliers on a daily basis. DIY guys like us make up only a portion of their business.

Smallbear remains the best one-stop-shop in the DIY pedal building place, and they carry a larger variety of pedal specific stock than anyone else, and they are expanding their stock weekly (faster than Mammoth and PPP). Steve (Smallbear owner) called me from Namm in 2010 when I had emailed in a question about some parts (Smallbear is located on the east coast, Namm is in California)! He spent half an hour on the phone with me in CANADA just to make sure I understood somethings I had questions about. Their people are available if you need help, and their customer support when there's a problem is top notch. I know it might seem crappy to look at 20 cents a resistor when you buy singles, but Smallbear's bags of 200 is still 5 cents cheaper than mammoth's (last I looked they were 3.95), and when you look at the bulk prices, pretty much everything is even.

In the case of Mammoth, they opened up about a year or so ago I believe. Instantly when they arrived I noticed that EVERYTHING on their website was a little bit less than Smallbear, just slightly, like by a couple cents or so, when purchased as singles. Essentially, they set themselves up, at the beginning, to under price Smallbear on everything. Since then I have placed 4 or 5 orders. Every one has had issues, some small and some major. I appreciate that Blake is doing his best, and his customer response has been very good for me. He's personable, and he's doing his best to run his business well. Fact is though, my last order with them was for more than 100 pots. I went with him to save money over going with Smallbear (the next best place price wise for alpha 16mm pots by the way, even better than PPP or any of those other places), and in doing so I ended up having a ridiculous duty bill on my end (I'm in Canada). Not Mammoths fault for sure, but I never get them on my Smallbear orders. Truth is, Smallbear would have saved me money in this case, but I hoped I'd save with Mammoth.

It's not just Smallbear to Mouser, cause if you go to Mouser you could save too. For example you may find a Vactrol for $2, but if you look down the list on Mouser you'll Vactrols of the same value made by different companies for more, perhaps as much as $12 (*hypothetical*). Sometimes the price difference is because the part is sourced from a different location, or because the parts themselves are of different quality. It's not just those kinds of parts - A Hammond 1590A is a better quality enclosure than the New Sensor 1090NS, but I buy the 1090 because the difference in quality isn't important in my use, and I need to save the few bucks in the difference in price. You don't know that the Vactrol from Smallbear and Mammoth actually compare to each other quality or price wise. Wima caps are considered better than many other brands, and people care a lot about things like Mallory or Orange Drop caps for their amps and guitars, but part of the reason they do is because their quality is better than the average film cap, and you pay for that difference. Yes, if the part is exactly the same from exactly the same source, bought at exactly the same price, then it would be questionable. However, we can't say that's the case.

On PPP, I agree that they are fantastic. I get all my enclosures through them, and some stomp switches. They have the widest supply of enclosure sizes and the biggest variety of powder coat colours available, and their customer service there is super top notch! I will always, always be their fan.

Oh, and don't forget to factor in price whenever you, or anyone else for that matter, is getting stuff shipped. That's one reason I like Tayda - cheap or free shipping. But sometimes it's worth it just to pay that extra little bit for a part because you can get it all from one place.

Jacob

[slimtriggers]

smallbear has lots of great hard to find parts for pedals including germanium trannies, that is what they're there for IMHO

+1  I can't think of a better place to go for tested, guaranteed germanium trannies.

For everything else, I've been going to Tayda lately. 

[jubal81]

I've ordered from Smallbear twice and both times got wrong parts and it took more than two weeks to get my order. I didn't notify them either time because 1) I'm lazy and 2) I figure I'll find a use for those parts eventually.

That being said, he does have things that are really hard to find elsewhere on the web. Speaking of which, anyone know another place to order the Alpha 'dust covers' for pots?

[jtn191]

anyone know another place to order the Alpha 'dust covers' for pots?

Tayda pots come with them 

[jkokura]

Does anyone know if the Tayda Alpha pots have the same shaft dimensions as the smooth shaft pots we get from Smallbear and Mammoth?

Jacob

[Melonhead]

so after a little booze and settling down,  i can understand where a lot of you guys are coming from.  Youve done business with these folks before, you know them on a first name basis.  I'm sure they have their hands full- running that kind of business and knowing which parts to supply etc and getting everyone's order straight has got to be mind numbing.  On the other hand, it's nothing personal, it's business.  I didnt go to college for applied physics or electrical engineering.  I build pedals because it's fun, it's cheaper than paying for overpriced boutique crap (there are exceptions), and it's something that i can do as fast or as slow as i want.   Having said that, if i pay money for something, it's gotta be right.  I spent a few hours converting all the caps to uF from pico and nf, compiling the list of mats that madbean so graciously supplies us with...you know THE LEGWORK...it's fun, i dont mind doing it.   It's just really frustrating to have to put my build on pause because some guy in a warehouse didnt take 1.5 seconds extra per part and write the name of the thing he was putting in the baggy.   Just frustrating is all.  Am i gonna have to source parts from smallbear again? im sure i will...and im sure the small bear guy is a really nice guy.  everyone in this building community seems to be (except me apparently )..but again, business is business.  i paid for it.  it should be right.
just my opinion.

[jkokura]

Nah, your experience is legitimate. I think you should write a (polite) email and share your experience. Businesses shod always appreciate feedback from their customers. I believe Smallbear is one like that.

Jacob

Also, sorry guys for the novel. Didn't intend that one to be so huge. Just kept continuing my thought.

[nzCdog]

Does anyone know if the Tayda Alpha pots have the same shaft dimensions as the smooth shaft pots we get from Smallbear and Mammoth?

Jacob

Tayda do knurled shaft, otherwise the same as the smallbear 16mm Alpha 'Smooth shaft'.

[sgmezei]

I have ordered from all the usual places listed here. The only mistake SB ever made was send me 4 extra 2n1306 transistors. I told Steve and he told me to keep them. That's just my experience.

Honest opinions are good though.

[timbo_93631]

     I have never really had problems with smallbear, shipping times can be long, but I usually only buy from there for harder to find stuff.  Now that they are out of Hotpotz-1's I am hanging up my wah repair hat.  Sad.  Before PPP put up their USPS priority mail or else disclaimer I had one order go missing totally, which they replaced for free, so it wasn't the horrible inconvience it could have been.  The worst thing I have had happen was with effects connection.  I had to file a paypal claim because they took my $ and never sent order confirmation, nada.  Long wait to get my $45 buck back and never a response to any of my email or phone messages.  So lame, they had the best price on Switchcraft jacks and 3PDT's in small quantites for a long time.  I know Mammoth has cocked up a bunch of orders for other people, but after around 10 orders from I still haven't had an issue.  I like their raw 4site enclosures. 
     If you are making many small orders often you are more likely to have a bad experience at some point than if you had placed one or two big quantity orders in order to have stock on hand.  But then the wife factor comes into play, "You spent how much on pedal parts?!?!?!?"
     Analogy time:  You go to Burger King and order your cheeseburger with extra cheese, no pickles, extra mustard, easy mayo, half the lettuce, and extra tomatoes, and the top bun toasted, one or more of those changes is not gonna happen.  If you order 30 cokes, 25 cheeseburgers with everything, and 40 large fries, you are probably going to get exactly what you ordered.

[GermanCdn]

I've had the same experience as most here, and I've ordered from all the usual suspects in the US and Europe (and my first Tayda order is going out next week once I get my final part count finished).  The reality is, mistakes are going to happen on web orders, and it doesn't matter if it's for electronics, or books, or fishing rods.  I've had entire orders from Cabela's go missing and then have them not be able to fill the replacement orders, I've had Amazon take my money and not ship for a month, etc, etc.  I've actually found that most pedal parts suppliers (PPP, smallbear, banzai, musikding, partspipe, madbean, guitarpcb, etc) have higher rates of getting the orders right, especially when you consider the high part count/low part value of the orders (think about it, you're paying a nickel for a single resistor, someone has to go pick that part out and bag it, it's hard not to burn five cents in operating costs just doing that).

The most reliable, easiest to deal with parts source I have had has been Banzai.  Every single part in your order comes in their own little ziploc bag, with the part number printed and barcoded on a sticker, and the orders have never been wrong.  They are also the highest cost individual part source for caps and resistors (twice as much as the next guy in many cases), and their shipping rates are the highest.  So, in the end, you get what you pay for I guess.