Sunday, November 11, 2007

State of the Store Address

There have been a lot of changes at the store in the past few months.

One of the biggest is the permanent retirement of Henry Heimerdinger, the former owner of the store (and my grandfather). He handed control of the business over to Carl in 1991 and semi-retired. Despite that, he still came in a few days a week to help with sharpening items customers brought in (mostly knives, scissors, and gardening tools). His last day was the twenty-ninth of August.

Another big change at around that time was that the clipper repair room was converted into a shipping room. The room has its own computer workstation and plenty of counter space for organizing and wrapping shipments. We've been getting enough online business that Carl decided we needed to dedicate some space to it. Never fear, we still repair clippers and supply repair parts for you to fix it yourself.

Since we lost the elder Mr. Heimerdinger's work back in the shop, we hired a new employee who has been trained in the fine skill of sharpening knives by hand. An interesting note is that some of the grinding wheels used in the shop had their design adapted particularly for this purpose by Henry Heimerdinger, who is a graduate of UofL's Speed School of Engineering. They work as well today as they did twenty years ago.

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