Camp Fire Wood

Welcome to the forum, Woodstax. Sounds like you have a nice business cranked up there. I lived in DFW for over 20 years last century.

 

Thanks Longshot......born in Mineral Wells (left after 2 weeks) stationed twice at Ft Hood then TCU and Baylor and retired....so decided to stick around. Prospects are looking good provided we can regularly stay out of burn bans

 

I like your idea. It makes sense to me.

 

Thanks! We are looking at retailing the 31 door machine at $8900.00 and are averaging about $800 a month for each machine with $500 as profit per machine ( cost of wood, transportation, bagging, 10% to state parks, swipe charges). We have set 10 since 1 June so I do not have a good year worth of sales data on them yet... but it is about 18 months for the machine to pay for itself

 

I think your idea is genius. Reminds me of the propane grill tank concept. That machine could be adapted to so many different items. I really like the concept. Good work!

 

Thanks Forty. You are correct, it does look like the propane machine at Home depot and luckily for my patent it works completely different. We have designed and built an automated propane vending machine based on our woodshaxs machine but it is much more complicated....on Friday we got our UL Hazardous location certification for that machine and are placing them at test stores in the DFW area to begin beta testing and then you will see them start popping up all over the place. The one at Home Depot came out in 2004 and never worked right and now you cannot even use the credit card portion of it as their 2G telemetry is not encrypted so they can't transmit CC info......They are junking them in favor of ours (it is between us and a Canadian Company). The one there now, works on inert gas to to power servos to open the doors and the Kiosk is 5ft away because the parts they used cannot be within the propane environment.....we use electromagnetic locks and kiosk parts designed for the location and we kept the Engineers away from it and designed it from the consumer/repaire/refiller point of view so it did not come out "over Engineered" so we have the better solution and ours is modular so you can have 5 door machines at gas stations, 11 door at convenience stores...all the way up to 70 doors (and beyond) at places like Home Depot and Lowes.....so we shall see how things go....As far as the woodshax...we are about to put one at a driving range which is far away from the Pro shop where they sell the range balls...I think they will like it

 

Welcome Woodshax , You're gonna like it here, I guarantee it-I love your set up and use of cutting edge tech to avoid expected bumps in the road-We just lost after very little time our section of the Hatfield-McCoy trail system due to a large land trust being sold or I would be asking for some franchise rights and purchasing of the system for use here-It has crippled our little community in short order-no sooner than some out-of-state influx of revenue Thur-Sun was realized it was gone-A new independent restaurant was built just for that reason and it is now closed. The other thousands of miles of the trail system with campgrounds everywhere are thriving but we lost our piece...again welcome and nice to meet you

 

I could do anything with the campgrounds around here. They all process and sell their own to keep the help busy.