hikarateboy

Hi Folks, Sorry about the delay in fixing attachment upload. I wasnt able to sort it immediately after go live on new server and work has had me away from home for last 3 weeks. I have some time off over weekend and going to dive deeper. That said I had mentioned that IPB has been turning the screws trying to get us to subscribe and so I am looking at moving to Xenforo which has a much more reasonable licensing model. I am also looking at that this weekend and moving to the new software might make more sense than fixing attachments in IPB. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for the heads up on the photo upload. I will look at that asap. Hopefully I will find the issue quickly. I appreciate you all.

After tons of hours and thousands of co-pilot messages (amazing really) to figure out the new host created a broken VPS. The site should be back and better than ever. Beat it up and let me know what you find. That said. IPB message board we use has become bloated and is bugging me to constantly buy updates and move to their cloud services. It's to the point that I am ready to jump to another forum product. I am not planning on doing it this week. But likely in the future. If you are interested check out xenforo, its lighter weight, has a very similar feature set and much more appealing licensing. Thanks all for your patience. I appreciate every member of the first and best damn guitar forum on the internet for over 30 years your friend Ted Martin For those that have no clue what I am referring to see the back story here:

For those that arent aware, we are moving hosts. read the thread below for details. To make that happen I need to freeze the database for the messageboard to migrate the data. Its massive 2+ gigs and will take a while to export, migrate and test. If all goes well, knock wood, we should be back up, id say within hours but its gonna take a long as its going to take considering the snags I have run into so far. Hopefully not a day or more. We should come back online in the same board you are used to. HOWEVER, IPB is getting aggressive about licensing and moving people to their hosted solution so I am looking at forum options. The front runner is xenforo, its similar but a bit less bloated and much better licensing set up for self hosted. Just a heads up thanks for the understanding

Good News! I have a reasonable host and am in the process of setting things up. Fingers crossed it goes well. I'll keep you posted. So far, its been a grind, but so good. Cant wait to ditch this crappy host

Hi Folks, First off this is not a plea for money, I appreciate all the support that people send, and I plan to keep the HFC going until it doesnt makes sense. Feel free to read as much or as little of this as you like but I wanted to be transparent on whats going on. As many of you may be aware we have been struggling over recent months. Our hosting company was sold last year and things continual are getting worse. The service being the most obvious as you may have noticed frequent 503 errors due to them reducing the amount of resources available. They have also increased our hosting prices by over 300%. furthermore, the plan we are on no longer works for us due to the resource demands from the board and the only option for staying is Virtal Private Server which cost exponentially more than of a traditional shared hosting account or offloading the board to invision cloud hosting but that alone is over $1000 per year and I dont want to lose the other pages. This really maked me miss the old days when I hosted the HFC on a throw away 386 running linux and apache in the basement of my inlaws office. Anyway, over the last few months I have been trying to find a situation that was reasonably affordable. I am planning to move hosts and am close to narrowing down my choice. The initial costs are reasonable as they give you a deal for a year then increase your monthly the next year. One of the issues is the size of the database as I have been retaining ALL posts from when we first moved to invision 20 years ago. I like the idea of having them available to search and revisit. However, I might need to drop quite a few or them. If I do, I will keep a copy and maybe bring it back up under an archive site. We'll see. I am working on keeping the recent stuff going first. What you need to know is this migration is going to happen soon, likely in the next two weeks. The site may be down or unavailable for a while as I migrate data. maybe days but I am hoping to avoid that. Please give me some grace on that as I do have a real job as well which has been very heavy. Lastly, I want to thank each and every one of you for being here. YOU are the HFC not that site and I am going to do my best to keep this clubhouse going as long as I can. your friend Ted Martin

Nope thats the right venmo. When ever you send support please include your screen name so I can reply with a thank you online and know who should be upgraded to supporter status. That said I will be starting a new thread shortly about some changes specifically to our hosting and the impact on the board. Stay tuned.

Oh and if you do send support ensure that you include your screen name to make sure that I upgrade you to supporter! Its hard to tell who is who from email sometime.

Thanks to all for the support. It really goes a long way. For those wondering, it goes toward the message board license and hosting fees. As mentioned in another thread, we have been bumping up against shrinking resource restrictions from our host and I have been working to find and setup more economical options to offload some of the strain. Thanks again. I appreciate you all.

Thanks all for the kind words and encouragement. I've been watching the stats as attachments moved to S3 storage and I am hoping that it will make a difference. Of course the moving of data, while automated, has been very Sloooooooooooow. Day 2 and counting. I've not done the Zelle thing and honestly don't know where to start with that.

Hey All, You may have noticed that the HFC has been experiencing some performance issues lately. I did make a change today to move attachment storage to amazon s3 to help take some of the load and hopefully that's a good first step. As with many things these days, the hosting provider we’ve used for the past decade was sold, and the new owners are placing more restrictive limits on resources. The goal seems to be pushing customers into higher‑tier, and significantly more expensive, plans to maintain performance. On top of that, the cost of our existing service has increased to the point that I briefly considered returning to the 1990s, when I ran the HFC from a server in my basement on a dedicated line. Invision does offer a hosted option, but it comes with a significant annual cost and doesn’t include the base site. Determining the best path forward has been a challenge. Before jumping to any conclusions, this is simply a plea for understanding as I work through the options, not a request for donations to cover the cost increase. I’m trying to keep expenses low to ensure the long‑term future of the HFC. Many members have generously donated in the past and continue to help, and I’m grateful for that support, but right now I’m focused on exploring alternatives. It may even be that, after nearly 30 years, it’s time to move on, or let one of the existing private Facebook groups take over the discussion. That said, I know many of you are knowledgeable and full of great ideas. I’m an IT manager by day, but my teams do most of the magic now. I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how we might move forward. The HFC is important to me, and I know it is to many of you as well. I’ve known many of you for nearly 30 years, and I’m not giving up, just wanting to be transparent. Let’s work through this together. your friend, Ted Martin

message me with your new email and I will set it up.

The biggest part of the reason the HFC has been the best damn forum on the internet for 25 years is because of the quality of its members as well as the mods. We also don't trust algorithms completely to validate that those registering actually are people! As such, the mods spend a good amount of time manually reviewing registrations. There are often cases where the registration looked fishy due to ip location, username, email address or muck rakers trying to access via second accounts. If you feel that your registration validation is taking too long, feel to reach out via the Contact Us link at the bottom of the page. Let us know who you are, your username, what email you used to register, and what brought you to the HFC and we'll take a look.

I was contacted by her husband who was trying to gain access to the site and while approving his access i also found the old post and moved it to in memorium as that section didn't exist when first created and that action bumped it

Annette (2/16/65 - 8/12/16) started at Hamer Guitars in Chicago while in high school and remained with the company until it relocated to Connecticut. As anyone knows, products are a direct representation of people who make up the company, so if you are a fan of Chicago era Hamer Guitars she can be thought of as part of the reason why.

I havent plugged it in yet but I can say this is the best guitar I have ever owned! The WHOLE guitar resonates even when just hitting a single string. It almost like its alive but it really isn't which is good because that would be freaky. The ebony board feels great and notice the truss rod cover. Nice touch. I am more than happy with non bound headstock. I didn't know if my conversation with mike about the neck profile translated but he nailed it. I wanted one similar to a vintage Hamer and I got it. I agree it may be wider like chris mentioned but it feels good. This short post will have to do for now as I need to spend some time with this.

Know what that means. Time for another run. Can you get on a new design for this one

hmmm, I suspect you are referring to one that will be come one of his signature models. He's only made a few of those for non rockstars. if I am on the right track, the answer to that will be an absolute yes! ;-)

I want to chime in and say that "asking questions" is the purpose of this forum so all is good. I would say a question like "will Mike make me a Duotone?" will get the same answer as "will Mike make me a "Les Paul?". No. If you ask for a double cut acoustic electric guitar with a piezo and a couple humbuckers the answer would probably be different. Bottom line though is Mike is making Shishkov's, and while there may be some similarities between what people order and what Mike used to build they will still be Shishkov's and not direct Hamer copies or law suit specials. Then again who I am I to speak for Mike, although I'm pretty sure he would agree. He loves the stuff he built and helped design so will not be surprised if their influence appears very strongly in his work. The most exciting thing in all this I think will be the guitars that he and his customers come up with that no one including mike have ever seen before. Ionel, if there is one thing I am sure of, YOU are just the man for that Job. I can't wait to see what you two come up with.

As Mike had been a Master Luthier at Hamer for years it only made sense that the HFC would support the next step in his journey after the decision to cease productions of Hamer Guitars was made. As anyone can expect starting a new business is a lot of work. Mike has gone from simply worrying about every aspect of building guitars to every aspect of creating an entire company. He and his wife Trish now have to cover every aspect of their own guitars company, Purchasing, Sales, Operations, Marketing, Janitorial and Customer Service. I havent even mentioned that Trish has a day job of her own. The big idea here is that not only is this board meant for discussion of Shishkov guitars between HFCers, but as place for Mike and Trish to communicate with those interested in Shishkov Guitars.

One thing people are assuming here is that the price on a similarly spec'd custom ordered guitar from Mike is going to be so much more that its no longer attractive. I am pretty sure that Mike is committed to keeping the prices reasonable. The special order was just beyond reasonable. Keep the faith.

Geoff: Right now, Mike is working out the custom pickup concept and basic supplier. Obviously, that will be based not only on his vision/hearing and customer inquiry, but also by whatever makes economic sense for him as a builder. I wouldn't rule anything out at this stage, but having you do a video (or videos) would definitely be a cool thing to add as a site feature! Couldn't hurt to give Frank Falbo a ring at Duncan, Frank's a great guy. Custom pickups? Really? I don't think that's necessarily a good idea since there's a pickup for every flavor right now and the market is saturated. Cross promoting with an existing pickup manufacturer is a really good idea... Seymour Duncan is the only company that has a decent ground game and so that's why I mentioned it. Making pickups isn't as easy as everyone makes it out to be... better off benefiting from someone with years and years of experience. But I digress, my opinion isn't worth squat. Frank Falbo is no longer with SD, he has Falbo guitars and is working on a new pickup company called Flux. I'd love to do a video... not with me playing or anything, just guitar porn and Mike talking about his new company... designed to sell guitars and would be all about marketing. But.. I offered my services for free to Stike and he turned me down. I'm not trying to make money and have always offered my services without any compensation. Most people are too good to have me help them. It's their fucking loss, not mine. I'd love to see you do the video. Sounds like its time for the hfc version of kickstarter to get you there. I'd throw in.

Chris is correct that the special ultimate offer and price is for the base model mentioned. Those with upgrades will be priced accordingly and I expect relatively reasonably priced but Mike is the last word on that. Upside MAY be that the number of orders for the base model without upgrades might be below 25 still so don't wait if you are thinking about pulling the trigger. Btw, Mike is swamped so please be patient while he works thru the pile and responds. He's also trying to put some new machinery in place today. I have a feeling its going to be a long day at the Shishkov house.

Coincidentally, I just got an email about sustain blocks from Mike's wife, this new business is a family affair for sure, and she mentioned that while he may have some I don't think he has many. There maybe a lucky few that get em. Stonge you ready to make another run of SBs? I kid, I kid. ;-)

BTW Props on the Website! Thanks, It appears to be working! Just happy to be able to help in anyway I can. Mike deserves it.