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Sometimes I'm right and I can be wrong. My own beliefs are in my song. The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then, makes no difference what group I'm in. I am everyday people! Yeah. Yeah. There is a blue one who can't accept the green one for living with a fat one trying to be a skinny one.
And different strokes for different folks. And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-bee. Oh sha sha… We got to live together! I am no better and neither are you. We are the same whatever we do. You love me you hate me you know me and then. You can't figure out the bag l'm in. I am everyday people! Yeah. Yeah. There is a long hair that doesn't like the short hair for being such a rich one that will not help the poor one. And different strokes for different folks. And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-bee. Oh sha sha. We got to live together! There is a yellow one that won't accept the black one. That won't accept the red one that won't accept the white one. And different strokes for different folks… and so on and so on.
OVERSEAS BIZ
Soon after my place got burned down, I designed my kit for the CBR 250
but I didn't have the money to register the design, less than a grand, but things have been skinny since downsizing me possessions to a pair of shorts, then I couldn't afford to buy headlights and spent most of my time doing freebies for people I owed money to, and Chinese fairings kept becoming cheaper.
Finally scraped up enuf to go to china with some moulds, and I sold 675 race kit to a guy who managed 1500 workers making wetsuits in Thailand, who convinced me to go to Chiangmai instead, his mate D from america was clever, hardworking, and had a big empty factory with hard working fiberglass workers, and I could get everything I needed cheaper and better.
I really like Thai food, and was always a bit nervous about china, so boxed up moulds at short notice, because D was being foreclosed on, so I hurried over with a bunch of borrowed money.
Richard had a 2 1/2 acre factory complex, with compressed air and hot water and temp controlled rooms, storage rooms full of surfboard blanks waiting for a buyer and workers quarters at the back.
A lovely Thai Mrs. M and 2 chubby children. he used the 700 I sent him to keep him alive until I came to rent a nice 2 storey house in a gated community with a nice lake in front, full of fish, $250/ month and employ a maid.
My big mistake was not insisting, when D refused to ring local suppliers to confirm they had stock of the woven fiberglass I needed, before I came over. I would have bought some with me to get started, and arranged to get some from china, but D refused to ring them because it wasn't necessary, they had everything. So after we spent a few days trawling around for some basic necessities, and a few more days ringing places in Bangkok, I arranged for some to be sent from china.
D was happy for the delay, he wanted to make a long line of tables down one of the main rooms of the factory, create new storage and shelving areas, something I thought could be done later, as we had no product to store. and only needed one table to glass on, and another to cut fabric on, he had leased out his imported Burmese workers, and kept one on just to sweep leaves 8 hours / day.
I dropped a heavy steel table on my foot while trying to drag in on my own, I don't wait well,
local hospital charged me $20 for the xrays, and $5 to stitch up 2 toes, and was full of smiling young nurses. D fed his hand into a band saw, so I got to meet them again a few days later.
Finally got fabric from China, got a couple of workers together, and started trying to work the resin that D sourced,
D spent on some things, but not others, he told me you could only buy this one type of resin, which we had to blend the styrene wax and accellerator ourselves, never quite got it working well, last day before I left, he told me he could have bought a premixed resin, like the online catalogue I showed him from I had on Australia premixed with known setting times and characteristics. Another time he screwed a local driver down to a few dollars to drive around for an hour for us, then the next time I needed him, I ended up waiting 2 hours.
After we starting fiber glassing, paint became a problem, M spent a lot of time on the phone to try to get the bigger brand name products from bangkok, then finally I contacted the Asian distributors in Hongkong for PPG, and got some excellent support from Alex, who gave me major suppliers deets in Bankok who could speak english, and occasional advice with dealing with locals, like 'don't get mad at them'.
I still had to play Thai way with Bangkok to send the paint, ring and ask him twice a day for his bank deets so I could send him a couple of G, and keep telling how important it was to my continued biz survival and future orders...
once the money was in account, paint arrived promptly, not sure why it was so important to jack me around.
The Burmese workers were fantastic, for $250 a month they worked like they were repairing a sinking ship, they stayed back to help me on week days, after their half day Saturday and occasionally on Sunday they would drop in to give me a hand. They did electrical, plumbing, building, welding, and soon learned fiber glassing, which they hadn't done, and then painting. Almost all on sign language.
As I became more invested,D became less helpful, he would come in at 11, clap his hands and wave them in the air, the workers would come running, and he'd tell them to clean the whole factory inside and out, then we'd argue, I'd say I'll pay for another worker to clean the factory, and that I needed to make the fairings before the day got hotter, he'd say it won't take long,
the workers had already scurried off with wheelbarrows and brooms anyway, I think the novelty hadn't worn off for him.
We also argued about how long the workers would fiberglass for, he said they could work on the glass for 8 hours straight, I said max of 3, then rotate to something else, when his daughter came on a Sunday she wasn't allowed to even be in the fiberglass room with yesterdays fumes, different class of people apparently.
