Sorry for not reporting on a very good meeting earlier, but I was tied up all weekend and then had 3 full days back here through my B-day doings yesterday. Anyhow, we had a great meeting and discussed the Extravaganza in detail and raffle stuff. On the Oct 30-31 event, we will again get the 30' x 60' booth (same spot as last year) with power and tables and any special equipment we may need. We can sell raffle tickets, calendars, whatever. Like last year, we need to have a good set of demos lined up -- he would love to have AlexL come again and even would like us to participate in their Main Hall demonstrations (he thinks AlexL would be fantastic for us and for them, too -- Alex can sell pens and other members could sell their items if they wanted as well). I said we'd certainly have enough willing members to do demos in our booth as follows: Scroll saw (PChristy, ScottM, CSkipper, Sawduster come to mind); Pen Turning (AlexL, DaveO, TracyP, others); Specialty demos -- I did pocket screw joinery and WorkSharp 3000 demo last year and Tom Ferone did bandsaw boxes. I have a list of approved caterers for our lunches and will get that to ScottM as we will need to use one of them.
We talked a little about the raffle -- he will work with us on any prize we want -- among those discussed were brands he can supply including ShopFox, Powermatic, SawStop, Rikon -- a big drill press like the PM2800 (about $950) or an 18" Rikon bandsaw (about $1350) would be a great prize -- I mentioned that we would go to Lee Valley and Lie-Nielsen again but our desire is to support our advertisers.
I also mentioned our thought about giving Gift Certificates for Calendar winners and he would like that, too. He is a great guy and we can count on continued support from him. We did discuss the Charlotte store closing, but that's not anything I'll discuss here.
As a follow-up, I did discuss the meeting with Steve Coles briefly when I stopped to see him on Saturday to pick up an item I bought from him. He liked the idea of a large Drill Press or a big Bandsaw, but he wasn't crazy about the idea that someone had made to have a widebelt sander as our top prize (I agree with him).
So in summary, it was a good meeting. I'm ready to get rolling on getting people lined up and for us to set up a Raffle Committee (I would like to chair it and it should be as few people as possible).