[Paul Copioli]

Michael and Brad,

I apologize for your situation regarding the ball shifter gears and the sprockets. We 100% quality inspect all of our custom made components (we lot check commodity items like bearings) and we found the engraving issue with all of the 16T and 22T #25 sprockets. We shipped out some without engraving but sent the rest to be engraved and will have them Monday. They are currently marked as "ships early next week" so you can still order them. This was a timing issue and I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

We did have to ship a certain quantity of the 3 Stage Ball Shifters incomplete without the 2 third stage gears. Our rationale in shipping these incomplete was that we'd rather get the bulk of the shifter components out to customers and let them start assembling the gearboxes.

We have shipped out all of the missing gears for orders that shipped without them and the 3 Stage Ball Shifters are now shipping complete. Both Mike's and Brad's (well, someone else on your team) gears will arrive at the shipping address today. I have sent both of you the tracking numbers via PM.

For the stock situation, there are rare cases where our actual inventory and Web site stock status are not in sync, specifically when orders for larger quantities come in quickly. We agree that our customers need to know the actual status of items so they can have knowledge of when they will arrive. We move them to either "out of stock" or "ships in xx days" as soon as we are made aware of the stock status.

For the VEXpro components, I made the decision to not put an item "out of stock" on the web site if it was going to be made available in a week or less, but rather put "available in xx days" so you can still order it. If it is placed "out of stock", then you can't even order the component.

You'll notice that some sprockets and 2 of the VersaHubs are marked as 'Shipping Early Next Week' -allowing customers to place orders but informing them of the shipping delay.

With regards to the hex bearing, our customer support received an e-mail just before 4pm yesterday regarding the bearing issue. If your issue is critical, please call our customer support so we can address it immediately. We will send your bearing out today along with an RMA number and a shipping label to ship the bad bearing back to us.

Once again, we apologize for the issues you both had and appreciate the feedback. Please do not hesitate to contact our customer support directly. At VEX Robotics, customer support is our highest priority so if you are not satisfied with something please let us know.

Paul