I just now had a chance to review the many postings about the
PowerRoll.  Due to financial and time constraints and stress problems,
I can't check email every day.

In retrospect it has become obvious that my ability to estimate time
and duration of work has in recent years suffered serious distortions.
I had no idea of the vast amount of labor involved in bringing a
product from concept to perfected article; moreover, of the amount of
work involved in making a complex electromechanical article easily
producible by unskilled labor.  In all of these tasks, I am proud to
say, I succeeded well, but to achieve these goals I learned to take
things one day at a time, which made time go by quickly and things get
done.  In this way, however, I was not always in contact with the
passage of time, and was truly horrified to be informed of how long
some customers had waited.  Yet, even so, it seemed that a breakthrough
was always just around the corner, as my mind raced ahead of my hands.

Further reinforcing my feeling that everything was all right, all
customers who had been terribly upset and even abusive in some cases
at the long wait, became some of my staunchest supporters once they
received their PowerRolls.

We calculate that we had received about 125 orders before I stopped
accepting them several months ago (we have turned away many orders
since, pending resumption of production!), and of these we shipped
about 65 altogether.  Considering that I and my assistant personally
did nearly all of the assembly work while continuing to do restorations
on pianos, and especially considering that I was reluctant to send out
many of these units despite much pressure from customers, because I was
unhappy with the quality control resources available to us due to lack
of funds, I am gratified that problems have been observed only with a
very small number of units, and, with the exception of only one type of
problem which required a solution by the electronics designers, all of
these problems were with poor quality control and not due to any
deficiency in design of the unit.  Moreover, these few problems would
normally be easily correctable in minutes by parts substitution; they
became more difficult because I ran out of money to build extra parts.

To recapitulate what I believe I explained in a previous posting: in
December of 2000, I submitted a purchase order for 70 sets of sheet
metal, which would have covered all units then due and left more on
the shelves.  However, in January I learned I had triple ulcers in the
esophagus, and while these healed, developed pneumonia.  These
hospitalizations were financially devastating, forcing me to cancel the
orders for parts, and as a final blow, I was hospitalized with a blood
clot in the right leg in September.  In all I calculate that I lost
seven months of work at minimum, in 2001, which was nearly a fatal blow
to my tiny restoration business.  I am still not fully recovered and
have severe abdominal pain daily due to still another problem, which
has reduced my work day to about four good hours, from the original
15 or so.  (We think we have a diagnosis and I am hopefully looking
forward to relief and a full return to work in several weeks through a
minor surgical procedure).  Nearly every day comes some depressing news
in the form of communications from an angry or worried customer (some
days a few of them) or creditor for whom I have no definite information,
knowing now as I do that I simply cannot estimate time.  Accustomed for
so many years to being liked by my customers, this has been an horrific
experience for me, and it has become a significant task for me to
remain calm and cheerful enough to be productive.  My wife and I are
working essentially alone, and we have been unable to find competent
affordable restoration help not requiring constant supervision.

I am not relating this to elicit sympathy or assistance, but to explain
why, despite my very best and sincere intentions, I have been unable as
yet to fulfill my obligations to my kind and good-hearted customers,
whom I love and admire; also to explain why, with no definite answers
about delivery dates, I have been so reluctant to reach out to customers
to "keep them informed."  Rather, contacting them with that lack of
news might be disappointing, and their reactions painfully depressing
to me, which does nobody any good.  Such communications appear to me to
be a no-win situation.

I must admit that, at the present writing, the very thought of the
PowerRoll makes me severely depressed, linked, as it is, with the
misfortunes described above.  With the few hours available to me in
which to work each day, even if I had the energy or time, it would be
a significant mental struggle for me to concentrate on tying up the few
loose ends involving extremely minor repairs and modifications to the
existing units belonging to my friends Tim Baxter, Craig Brougher,
Albert De Boer, Gerry Bay and Larry Rubinstein, sent to me many months
ago for repairs.  These fine people have been very patient to say the
least, and sometimes have understandably lapsed into distrust, which
I can only endure with discomfort until circumstances enable me to
address these units as I feel they should be addressed.  Honestly
stated, I am simply overloaded, overwhelmed and burned out at present.
One can only take so much; and I am in what I call "survival mode"
while I marshal my energies for another attempt.  I still firmly
believe that I will eventually succeed, if given a chance.

With all due respect to Mr. Eggert: however naively, I never regarded
the PowerRoll project as a risk to my customers.  The PowerRoll was
developed "on a shoestring," one might say, but it never occurred to me
as any kind of risk to my customers, because of my absolute determination
that it would succeed.  At such time I expect to find some means of
compensating these people for their inconvenience.  As for my degree of
risk, as in all of my dealings, I put myself and anything I had on the
line to fulfill my obligations; this is perhaps why I have accumulated
nothing.  We did not require more than a one-half deposit to place an
order, but offered a significant discount for advance full payment,
explaining that the funds would help us to meet expenses of manufacture
and continuing development at the time, and we did not make a secret of
the fact that we were not rolling in money.  Whatever was received went
into manufacture of units; however, anyone analyzing our financial
records would quickly see that we spent far, far more to build the
units manufactured, than we ever received.  Although the BRC
corporation owns the PowerRoll, we gave it whatever it needed to
achieve success, from my restoration shop earnings, until those
earnings were interrupted by my illness.  Our personal standard of
living went down, not up, as we subsidized the project with restoration
work; and the PowerRoll project lost a considerable sum of money, due,
among other reasons, to my insistence on the best possible materials,
design and construction.  The project was obviously undercapitalized
from the outset.  I have never had the financial savvy to put aside a
"nest egg" for our future, then to pretend, like many of my wealthy
customers, that I was broke when the "nest egg" was all that remained.
When I said we were broke, we were broke.  And we did not ever go back
to anyone and ask for the balance due until we felt that shipping was
imminent; in many cases we declined to accept the balance due or did so
with warnings, only at the absolute insistence of the customer when we
were sure it was clear to them that we could not be sure when shipping
would occur.  Nor was the price ever, under any circumstances,
increased in mid-stream!

Unfortunately, the interruption of production occurred precisely at the
time when the unit would have finally begun to earn profits, the previous
run having been delayed by my research into ways to manufacture the
device more rapidly, with unskilled labor, but without compromising
quality.  In point of fact, the processes I developed improved quality
and accuracy of manufacture, which, strangely enough, precipitated a
problem.  Increased accuracy of valve seating increased the force
needed to unseat valves against high vacuum, and on certain Duo-Art
actions, brought the current needed at pump suction levels to a higher
level -- just over the line at which problems started to occur.  It was
not the migration of adhesives, but the decomposition of felt
cushioning material on the three most commonly fired valves: sustain,
and the two internal accompaniment graduation accordions -- which
deposited a chemical which caused these valves to stick.  No damage was
done to the actual valves or coils.  It is beyond the scope of this
article to discuss the many solutions we developed to this peculiar
problem which was limited to a small subset of PowerRoll owners, but
they are not difficult and are unrelated to the essential design of the
PowerRoll.

The commotion of development now completed, it only remains to get the
product back into production, which means money.  There is one group of
people in particular who have expressed interest and with whom I have
been in touch, who are interested in finding ways to get the unit back
into production, and I will make an announcement immediately if and
when arrangements have been made.  However, I have not received any
actual proposals in writing as yet.

Some people have expressed to me that I have been said to be
uncooperative in arranging to subcontract out or license the rights
to the PowerRoll.  I don't feel that this is true, and think that such
ideas must be the result of misunderstanding.  Naturally I have never
expected to receive one cent of royalties before all units have been
delivered which are now owed, and afterwards, only ask whatever is fair
and usual in such cases.  I never expected to become rich from this
product; only to prove my abilities and hopefully to be free to develop
other useful and uplifting products.  From the beginning I have
intended to eventually subcontract the unit, but not until I felt that
it fulfilled our vision of what it should be and was good enough and
producible at reasonable cost to provide profit without reduction in
quality, which it now is.  My only requirements are that the licensees
state clearly their intentions in advance, which naturally should be
friendly and respectful to us and to the maintenance of high standards
of quality in manufacture and service; that they give their best
efforts to promoting and selling the product; and that they be willing
to be bound contractually to these expressed intentions.  If there is
something unreasonable in this I am open to discussion of it, but these
seem to me to be modest enough requirements.

I am deeply moved by the expressions of understanding and support by so
many people.  Perhaps the most faithful of all has been Gary Rasmussen,
who has never for one moment lost faith in me or the product, spending
his own time and money to promote the PowerRoll although he well knew
that I was in no position to reciprocate, while being painfully blunt
about what he felt should be done, from his experienced vantage point.
Mike Ames, Tim Baxter, Richard Brandle, Spencer Chase, Jack Breen,
Craig Brougher, Andy Taylor, John Tuttle, and in Australia Ross
Chapman, Michael Waters and several others, are a quick sampling of the
names of fine people who have unselfishly and generously offered or
given help in one form or another.  No one I omitted should feel left
out; I have not forgotten you.  The product exists because of the
generous efforts of Robbie Rhodes, who introduced Laurent Coray and me
to one another when I told him my idea, but most of all, because of the
absolute confidence shown in me, for some inexplicable reason, by that
brilliant engineer who died so unfairly in the prime of youth and at
the zenith of his vigor, productivity and creativity, of a brain tumor.

Randy Herr, I am already deeply indebted to you for introducing me
to Dr. Clarence N. Hickman, and your kind words and kind offer are
overwhelming.  But since I am not sure when BRC can pay it back, nor
whether it would be sufficient as seed money to do the job, I would be
cautious about accepting it even into an escrow account unless applied
to a well-developed strategy.  I will give you a call and we can
discuss the situation.

I plan also to contact Wayne Tougher and Mark Kinsler to ask their
suggestions.  We have had several additional letters privately offering
various kinds of help, and continue to gratefully respond to these.

I don't know how such things are done, but if someone can think of a
strategy for a group effort, I would be open to considering it.  Here
is one risk-free approach which occurred to me:  those who are sure
they would buy a PowerRoll if they were assured of delivery in reasonable
time, could place conditional purchase orders, without any money due
until delivery.  With enough of these in hand as collateral, a bank or
private lender might feel secure enough about repayment prospects that
they would administrate a loan at a reasonable rate of interest, to
cover the cost of materials and labor for a run of 100 units or more.
Naturally the deal would require building and shipping the past due
units first.  Judging by the number and nature of inquiries we have
had, it would not take long to acquire enough purchase orders to cover
the cost of due as well as the additional new units.

Those who are good with money management might have some additional
ideas for us, and we would gratefully listen to their suggestions.

I hope this will answer the questions which have been asked in all
of the recent postings.  Forgive me if I don't respond right away to
inquiries; I will do so as soon as I possibly can.

Sincerely,

Larry Broadmoore