Contact
Contact Welt & Edge
One editor, one inbox, no contact form. Write to Lowell Trask and a person reads it, usually within three working days.
We are a three person operation with day jobs at benches, so the inbox is not staffed around the clock. It is however read by the people who wrote the entries, which is the part most contact pages cannot promise.
Lowell Trask
Editor. Handles everything that arrives, and answers the boots and leather questions himself.
Reply within three working days, Mountain Time. Longer in September and October, when everyone in Montana is somewhere else.
Worth writing about
What Reaches the Right Person?
Four kinds of message get a real answer, because they land in the hands of whoever keeps that part of the log.
- Corrections. A number we got wrong, a cost that has moved, a repair that is no longer offered. Send what you have and we will publish the fix with a dated note.
- Your own records. If you have tracked a piece of gear across several seasons, we want to see it. Several entries here started as somebody else’s notebook.
- Repair shops. Especially resolers, sharpeners and textile repair people outside Montana and Idaho. Our map of who still does this work is thin and we know it.
- Questions about construction. Whether a specific boot can be rebuilt, whether a blade can be rehandled, what a seam is likely to do. We answer these when we can and say so when we cannot.
After you press send
What Happens Next?
Four steps, and the third one is the reason replies take days rather than minutes.
- The message goes to Lowell, who reads everything that arrives.
- If it is a textile or a blade question it goes to Marisol or Ezra the same day.
- If it touches a published number, whoever wrote that entry checks the original invoice or measurement before replying. That is the slow part.
- Corrections go live with a dated line at the foot of the entry saying what changed and who reported it.
We keep correspondence to answer follow up questions and nothing else. It is never added to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list.
Limits
What We Cannot Help With
Five requests arrive often enough to answer here. None of them get a useful reply by email, and we would rather say so than waste your afternoon.
- Valuations. We cannot tell you what a knife, a collection or an old pair of boots is worth. We repair things, we do not price them for resale.
- Authentication. We cannot confirm whether something is genuine, or which shop or year it came from, from photographs.
- Product recommendations by budget. Ask us whether a construction can be rebuilt and you will get an answer. Ask us for the best boot under 300 dollars and you will get a shrug.
- Warranty disputes. We have no relationship with any manufacturer and no standing to intervene in one.
- Guest posts and link placements. Nobody writes here who has not spent years repairing the thing they are writing about, so these get no reply at all.
Before You Write, the Answer May Already Be There
Most incoming questions are about whether a given piece of gear can be repaired at all. That question has its own page, with the decision we actually use on the bench.