David Harwick Spares Ltd - STATUS UPDATE...

[Phillip]

The following information was distributed to SOC members in the e-mail SINGERFLASH 2020/037, as well as on Facebook. It is of high importance to all of us who wish to continue enjoying our pre-war Singers in the longer term and for those currently restoring a car.

Sally and Steve took on the enormous task of maintaining the spares business after the sad loss of their father, Dave, and we owe them a huge debt of thanks for continuing to support pre-war Singer owners in spite of personal trials and full-time jobs of their own. Hopefully the SOC will eventually be able to set up the re-manufacturing of new spares using Dave's patterns as a basis. The situation has been further complicated by the loss of the Gibson Brothers business also, who complimented Hardwick Spares with some excellent pre-war parts of their own as well as engine rebuilding / modification services and car restoration.

Here is the update statement in full for those who have not seen it:

UPDATE ON DAVE HARDWICK SPARES LTD

As mentioned in the September/October magazine, Steve Hardwick & Sally Wilkinson have re-started their spares operations & are now back in business. However, they are now requesting that all enquiries & transactions are carried out electronically through their website, detailed below. Steve & Sally have released the following statement, which has already gone out on Facebook. Now, we are sending a longer version to all of our club members on Singerflash & it will also appear in the November/December “Singer Owner”. It contains important information about their immediate & long term plans.

We would like to inform you all that after 50 years of remanufacturing and supplying spares to the Singer community, we are going to start running down our stocks of new parts. Since Dave died in 2013, Steve and Sally have both continued Dave’s passion until very recently on top of full time jobs but in the last couple of years our service has been disrupted by health issues. We have decided that we have to make a plan for the future as we don’t want our service to stop suddenly to the detriment of customers which would almost certainly happen if we try to carry on as we are for a few more years. We much prefer to have a slower exit which allows a much easier path for us all.

For the benefit of those customers that have not had the opportunity to visit our base at Skellingthorpe in recent years, we have now moved the majority of our new re-manufactured stock from the house to a purpose built warehouse which is now fully racked out and catalogued. We hold in this warehouse approximately £400,000 worth of new stock and it is our intention to continue to sell these products but not remanufacture them when the current stock is exhausted. While we expect that some of the more popular items will cease to be available quite quickly, a lot of parts may remain available for a few years and this is ok with us, we will offer what we have in stock as long as we have it.

Once the stock of our cast products is exhausted, we have agreed we will transfer the pattern equipment to the Singer Owners’ Club Ltd to allow continued production of castings that are only currently available from us, so that hopefully long term these products will continue to be available. Please note that these arrangements will only start to become operable once our own stock has been sold, so it is not likely to be for some time yet.

To support our current operations, we have developed a website: http://www.singerspares.com

This website is now functioning but we are still developing it further. At present it very much resembles an online version of our catalogue but behind the scenes we are updating the descriptions and application notes and adding photographs of the parts to the drawings from the Catalogue.

With immediate effect, we would ask you all to use the website as your means of ordering from us. We currently spend an enormous amount of time producing quotes for parts many of which are never purchased. This website allows you to browse the catalogue and see the prices for all the parts that you are interested in. You can add or remove from your basket until you have an order that you are happy with and you will be able to see if we have any stock of the parts that you are interested in. Once you proceed to checkout, the order will come to us so that we can check stock, sort out any questions that may arise, and then email you a total cost inclusive of postage and shipping to your address prior to payment. We are confident that this tool will improve over time and will speed up our service to you.

As many of you know, we do also have a vast range of original spares. It has not been previously possible to make everything we have visible to you, but going forward we will add our original stock to the website and anything that is special or not manufactured by us will also appear for all to see. In addition, there will be some of our unrestored cars for sale in due course so it’s positive news for us all.

Thank you all for your custom to date and we hope you all can benefit from our new way of working.

Regards,
Steve Hardwick & Sally Wilkinson
Dave Hardwick Spares Ltd.
singerLMspares@btinternet.com
http://www.singerspares.com