J&S Timber Products Celtic Music Wood Robert McCray John McCray John R. McCray The best described wood you will never see Ketchikan Alaska

 Beware of this company/person.  It can't fit into this description all the lies I have been able to catalogue which he has told me.  I call them lies because he said one thing and in the very next email stated the opposite over and over again.  I was a fool to overlook it and consider my loss as a lesson in how not to be stupid.  He promises one thing and does another.  He demands one thing then demands something else entirely.  He promises your material is on the shop floor ready to mill then, when he has your money, he tells you that his "men" are going out into the forest to harvest your order.

I am knowledgable in the business of spruce and tone wood for musical instruments and even I was taken in by this fraudster up until he had my money.  Then he let all his true colors come out.  He had promised that the wood he was sending would have all the qualities of fine violin and guitar top wood.  This is a much higher grade of wood than I get from my normal piano sound board spruce provider because pianos need boards that are often 8' and even 10' long while guitar builders use wood 2' long that can actually be split.  My long lumber can't be split, it must be sawn.  I shouldn't have believed him.  I think he actually got me to believe his special sawyer knew how to get wood as perfect with a saw mill as one can get by hand splitting spruce.  Then he claimed his sawyer quit but that he'd easily get another (apparently another wizard with the same magical powers on a small island with what is probably a three digit population.)  Well, the truth is that you can't and I was a fool to think you could.

He promised me that, now that he had my money, I would be getting one to two emails per day to update me on the progress of my order.  I had to finally give up on the many emails I sent to try to get a response from him and called his number.  He instantly emailed me back with abusive language that I will not repeat here.

Up until he started swearing at me because I wanted clarification on my duties concerning shipping and my repeated request for a receipt I finally realized that everything he was saying had been a lie to get money out of me without doing anything.

Having read online forums about him that verify this (note, in particular the acoustic guitar forum) that I realised that I'd been duped. 

What is more, the law of Alaska (I checked) states that no transaction is complete within that state until the customer is provided a reciept for their money.  He refused to give me a receipt.  There is also a Federal law permitting me to cancel an order over $25 within three days of having been given my receipt. 

I asked for a return of my money before any receipt came to me, and before my three days would have been up in any event.  My order had been in the thousands of dollars.  Despite the fact he had no completed transaction and the "material" he was supplying me was still lying on the ground in some forest he didn't even own (this based on the Ketchikan town meeting minutes available online) he took a 25% restocking fee for putting nothing back into the forest he hadn't removed it from.

Just to kick it up even more, he had sworn to me that my wood was in log form already on his shop floor for my order for him to cut it up.  When he got my money, this log suddenly disappeared and he was claiming he was out harvesting my wood.  Then he claimed he had men on staff out harvesting the wood when I asked for a refund.  All of this was obviously delaying tactics intended to see if he could manage to keep the money without providing any services.