Yeah, imagine that, excellent customer service! Always great to hear too Steve.
Now about Stew-Mac's prices it may surprise some of you to hear that many of us who work in the trade do not at all consider Stew-Mac to be high priced.
First it's not easy being Stew-Mac and participating in a market that has two very different groups as prospective clients, perhaps three.
You have the snot-nosed, heavy metal vomit music folks (me, I'm not judgmental....
) who want a tool to install their $25 orange drop, "vintage" cap and they want that tool to be free or cost less than $2.00. They may not be sure why they need the $25 "vintage" cap but someone on some forum who was also likely compensating (there I go being judgmental again..... 
) for other inadequacies proclaimed that these caps are the bees knees....Then you have the hobbyist builders who are still smarting from the idea that although you can build a D-18 look-alike with decent results for $400 no one ever told them that they need $2,000 worth of tools, many specialized to do so....
And then there are the folks in the trade taking in many instruments daily (hopefully completing and delivering many instruments daily too....) who view good tools as money makers, liability limiters, and capability enhancers. These folks are not as price sensitive and in my opinion are not the ones who consider Stew-Mac to be high priced.
From another view too let's face it many of the special tools that Stew-Mac designs and or sources and possibly manufacturers might have a life-time total market of 200 units. Ever source production goods and services. If so and I suspect that you and most have we all know that there is one price for one, another price for 100 and yet another price for 200. At the end of the day though the 200 number is not a large run for anyone and these costs have to be passed on to customers if we want to have Stew-Mac around to serve us in the future.
And yet another area for this same topic is the quality of Stew-Mac stuff. It's holds up well to daily use and as such may be over kill for the one time user of say a reamer for bridge pins. But to industry pros we appreciate that if we lay out $50 for a reamer that reamer will still be sharp and serving us well ten years from now. Amortize our 1,217 times that we use the tool in it's life over that $50 and Stew-Mac is not at all expensive, far from it.
Since Dave and I are going to produce the laser guided, vacuum clamped "Collins Saddle Mill" or "CSM" we are experiencing in real time first hand how very expensive it is to source parts, quality parts, have custom metal machining done both for prototypes and production units. This stuff IS expensive! We are only attempting to produce one product for now, Stew-Mac produces just how many products...?
So I've always been a Stew-Mac fan and likely will always be one too. We are lucky to have them, their customer service is second to none, the pricing in my view is very good for the value received, and most of all it's the very fine folks, the people at Stew-Mac who make the difference.
For me Stew-Mac is a highly trusted, very valued supplier that I feel fortunate to have available to me.
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