Summary: Well once again I have to start off by saying that I’ve been stopped from getting to the Casino over the last few weeks by my daily grind of family and work commitments.<br> They come first. And I come last. Such is life. I know I’m not the only one. I’ve been told it happens to all of us.<br> However I have not been idle by any means with my Craps Journey.<br> I have a few photos to share (see below), as I have spent considerable time to put together my Craps Table which was stuck in storage for nearly a year. So now is as good as any to dedicate a podcast episode for how my table came to be.<br> I’d been looking for a Craps Table for 2 years as soon as I started my Craps Journey, but being in Australia they are rare – in very short supply, and no one is selling them.<br> I had been talking with Big Jeff from <a href="https://bigjeffscrapstables.com/">Big Jeff’s Craps Tables</a> in USA and he was going to help me build a table.<br> The only downside to that is that I don’t have the space, tools, skills or time to build a great table.<br> Getting one of Big Jeff’s or any other timber masterpiece sent from America to Australia was going to cost me a fortune (or so I thought)<br> So I found a vendor in China by using the Alibaba network of manufacturers.<br> Of course this is a risky venture since you are buying a table from a manufacturer in another country that you only can see photos of what they produce (or supposedly produce).<br> With a lot of trepidation I was chatting with 2 vendors for over 1 month to pick the one that I thought would do the best job and most importantly deliver the table to me in Australia.<br> I’m not going to reveal the vendor that I ultimately chose, because as you will see they didn’t meet my expectations.<br> The table I wanted was an 8ft 2.4m table which was 4ft 1.2m wide. All of the tables they had previously built were only 1m wide, but I wanted it to be as wide as possible. I wanted the table to be portable. And by portable I mean, be able to be broken down and moved from room to room or place to place and put back together again. I have many videos on my how to build a craps table page of people building tables that can break down as needed. So I took ideas from them and put in some of my own and gave the vendor my instructions of what I wanted.<br> The table cost $950USD which I had to electronic money transfer to China. Now that was a 2 hour visit to the bank to make that happen. Which was like pulling teeth. You’d think I was the first person to try to send money to a bank in China from Australia, I was amazed and frustrated at the same time.<br> One month ticked away and I was eagerly waiting for some photos of my craps table (aka furniture art) from the vendor.<br> Finally I was rewarded with photos, and it looked impressive. Very clean job and well constructed. Of course what can you really see from a photo. In this case, it turned out, not the stuff I wanted to see.<br> I should have asked to see the table disassembled and with a clear showing of how to the table bolts back together again. But I didn’t. I was so caught up in getting the table to me.<br> The next stage after the build was harder than the actual build itself. The shipping.<br> What a nightmare doing shipping from another country into Australia. They don’t make it easy at all. And if you have anything that is out of the ordinary / large / made of timber, it’s even harder. For never having any prior shipping import / export experience, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.<br> First I had to engage an import broker to help me, since I could see I wasn’t going to be able to get this table into the country on my own. The broker provided me with all the forms, and more money was transferred to the broker to get things started. Lots of paper work then ensued to get the broker what they need...
