Hi Vise plus minor website update

Come Monday we should have our new Hi Vise available via our Store page.

Also, a major upgrade for us but a minor one for customers; a new cart system.  Our old cart worked fairly well but it could not calculate shipping costs for weighty items.  This worked OK for smaller orders, but alas we flipped a coin over 10 years ago, which would it be, high end thimbles or vise hardware?  The thimbles lost out to the vises and hence the widely varying costs of shipping heavy cast iron to various parts of the country and the rest of the world.

Many of you know that our kludged solution all these years has been to issue a shipping invoice after the fact.  We did this primarily to save our customers any unnecessary expense, but at the cost of time and energy to us (setting a flat rate cost would have been super easy for us but would have resulted in some pretty gross over payments for our coastal friends).  The downside of course, other than the extra work, as many of you also know, is that very often the additional invoice would cause confusion "I already paid, why am I being charged again...." and more often than not the invoice would go straight to spam resulting in some serious shipping delays.

So come Monday the new cart will be live.  It will probably cause it's own flavor of problems (hopefully not) but we'll get them ironed out in good time.  So far it's working perfectly in testing.

The rest of the website is also currently in full face lift mode, but it's going to be a little while yet.