I have emailed flow. I am wanting to know what solve they provide when customers receive faulty product. The teeth do not fit together so one panel of the brood box will not fit. The wood has splits and its chipped on edges on some of the intricate parts. Your experiences welcome.
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Hi, I am writing from Italy. We received the first box of our Flow Hive last night and assembled it today (the plastic components will be sent to us at a later date, according to the paperwork). We too have found that the wood work has been done with poor craftsmanship, and that the wood components are very thin and flimsy. I don’t know why we assumed cedar was a hard wood, but in reality some of the wood components arrived with splits and chipped edges.
Now that we have assembled the hive, it does look pretty and smells fabulously good, but for the 100s of Euros we paid for this, I would have expected better quality.
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@Faroe in Flow customer service usually tells people to send an e-mail to info@honeyflow.com with your order number, order e-mail address and photos of the problem. Flow have been very good about quickly replacing faulty, damaged or missing parts. Hope that helps.
Dawn
Great, thank you. I can’t drag a photo in on this phone but I’ve sent an email. I don’t want to pay any more as its been a $1400 experience so far including the Tung oil and I’ve no functional hive to show for it. Will find out what they say, I’ve got a 4 day wait.
I have had the exact same problem. The joint cut quality is terrible. I had to use a chisel to take off between 1/16" up to 3/8" of material in order to get them to fit. Once they do, there are a lot of gaps. It is an obvious manufacturing flaw since if you start from one end of the board, the problem gets progressively worse as you reach the other side. It was the same issue in both kits I ordered. The bottom board which was pre-assembled had cracks in the wood where the screw were used and the lap joints were not aligned or square. The quality of cedar used was terrible with a lot of knots and cracks in the grain. I expected a lot more given the cost.
I too had to wait for the actual flow frames to arrive, and when they did were not at all what I was expecting. Half of the frames were so loosely tensioned that the fell apart in shipping. After spending hours getting them back together, I grew to hate the piano wire tension cable system. I don’t know what would work better, but this is a fatal flaw of the system. I will be happy if these things last a season or two.
I will never buy another product from this company based on the worst design and manufacturing I have ever seen in any product. It is a shame because the concept has a lot of potential. I have spent the last year defending the Flow hive to others, and still support the idea. I just hope another company with more manufacturing and design experience does it better. These people have no idea what they are doing, and have managed to make me feel like a giant sucker for giving them my money for an inferior product. If I could get a $1200 refund today for both of my kits, I would take it and they are both assembled and brand new never used. This says nothing about the problem most people have with flow hive, but everything about its complete and total lack of quality.
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I’m the same, such a strong supporter but they have been so let down on quality and workmanship I’ve now lost so much faith.
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I’m sorry your order has arrived faulty. We are happy to organise replacement parts if you just email pictures to faults@honeyflow.com - please include your order number or the email address you used when you first ordered.
My first HF box came together pretty well with just a little chisel, handplane, and drum sander work. I was glad I had a full wood working shop at my disposal when it arrived. The second, OTOH, was so far off, I wonder if anyone is even checking the pieces before shipping. Dimensions are over 1/4" off in some cases and the box teeth will have similar gaps to be filled once re-cut to make them fit. All four corners. With a lot of work (and wood filler) I could probably get something serviceable but that’s not what I paid for so I am sending the whole thing back for replacement. My bees come in May so I hope they sort this out soon!
Mine was so tight it took a mallet to whack it in and out. Took hours to sand down by hand. However, it was the holes drilled in the roof that did not align to the supports that threw me. Who wants random holes in the roof? Wood putty saved the day.
Bee Thinking customer support was very positive and got me new boards very quickly. The new ones fit perfectly so it looks like they addressed whatever went wrong on the line.
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Tic tock, It may not help, but try this; Take the curved pieces and flip them around forwards and back and one side and the other. Mine were actually directional, went together perfectly one way, hardly at all the other.
Thanks for the suggestion, but no, the parts were mis-cut. I tried every way possible to get them to fit because I really didn’t want to have to deal with a return.
Oh too bad. The return isn’t a big deal. I had one piece that was damaged and as soon as I sent the pictures they oked a replacement. Didn’t have to actually return the part.
I too was somewhat dissatisfied with the western red cedar as compared with existing pine hives and existing medium 8 frame boxes I had purchased elsewhere. Now after using I do not want anything but 8 frame hives constructed from western red cedar. I can’t believe how easily they have taken to splits, I believe it has something to do with the reason your grandma stored her wool sweaters in cedar chests.