Good Morning!

I'm Dave Corbin, founder of Corbin Manufacturing and Supply, Inc., (which is known around the world of shooters as just plain CORBIN, the bullet swage people). For more than 30 years, our company has been supplying the top quality bullet making equipment and supplies, books, software, marketing and design assistance to bullet makers in 22 countries. We have a small, dedicated crew of die-makers who build each and every tool by hand, right in our own die-works. Because we are all knowledgable shooters, with additional skills developed in other fields, we bring you products and assistance second to none.

We operate four websites. The main site is www.Corbins.com. This is our on-line instruction and product display room. If you want to study swaging in all its many facets and see what kind of bullets you can design, this is the place to go.

The second site is www.BulletSwage.com. This is essentially a mirror site for the first one, in a different part of the country. If you find one site is a little slow on some nights, try the other one. Internet traffic can really put a load on the various paths at times, while others are relatively quiet. And likewise, if floods, fires, or other problems cause one site to go down for a while, the other site should be capable of taking over the load.

The third site is our secure e-store server. You can jump to it by clicking on the "padlock" graphic on our main web page. Not all of our products are listed on the shopping cart server, but more of them are being added all the time. Because of the tremendous amount of customization we do, an e-mail message to explain exactly what diameters, shapes, and other features you might want usually needs to be sent about the same time as your order for dies and equipment. But the main reason for this site is the 128-bit encryption and secure database to hold your personal information such as bank card number. I'm the only person in our company who sees that information, so it's a lot more secure than handing your card and driver's license to someone you don't know at a real store...they actually get signatures and other ID from you. That's a lot more risky than our secure server!

The fourth site is this one, www.Swage.com. It has links to our other sites, but primarily it is a document storage server. We are constantly adding and updating new materials, including complete books, brochures, folders, forms, charts, and even sound files, that you are welcome to download, print, read, and (if you are a Corbin client of record) even use in your own promotional efforts. All material is copyrighted, but Corbin gives you, as a purchaser of Corbin presses and/or dies, the right to use any of this material to help you in your business. And you don't even have to give an acknowledgement, much less pay any fee. We do reserve the right to require written permission of those who are NOT clients, and to insist upon acknowledgement in the form of a small "Used by permission of Corbin Manufacturing and Supply, Inc." with each publication by a non-client.

To download files from this site, you have but to click on the name of the file, and your browser should (if it is working correctly and set up to do so) ask you if you want to read or view the file, or save it to disk. This means, of course, save it on your hard disk or wherever else you wish to indicate in the dialog box that opens. Some browsers may have a pre-determined location in their preference or setup section for downloads. As long as you know where your downloaded files will go, you can find them again and view or print them later.

The Adobe Corporation offers a free program called "Adobe Acrobat Reader", which opens files called "Portable Document Files". These have the extension of ".PDF". The advantage of this format is that the layout, colors, photos, and text will all display and print exactly as it was produced in the original document. If you have been involved with the web very long, you probably realize that this is a big deal: the HTML language used for most website programming changes the layout, fonts, colors, and may not even display some objects depending on the particular brand and version of Browser you are using, and further, how its settings are adjusted. Printing a web page may or may not always give you usable results. But printing one of these PDF files nearly always works perfectly.

The Acrobat Reader is the free utility that Adobe hopes everyone will download and use. You can also update to the full Acrobat suite of tools, if you wish to create and publish your own documents with it. This is not free, of course, because it is the reason Adobe gives the reader away free, hoping you'll see benefits in buying the other software. But if you just want to view or print our technical papers, books, and other documents, the free Acrobat Reader will do it. You can download it from Adobe's Website. Just follow the text to locate the free reader download. Then once you have downloaded it, click on the file to open it and make it install the software so your computer and browser can use it.



Under e-books, I have produced a Rocket e-Book edition of the Corbin Handbook (.rb extension), a graphic file for its cover, and an html version so you can click on the chapters and jump to them from the table of content. When you click on the html version, it will open and display on your screen like any other web page. But you can then click FILE and SAVE to save the book to your disk for later reading. The Rocket e-Book file works on the Franklin or Rocket e-book readers, which exist as physical devices and as software for your PC. RCA took over the Rocket line, and now produces e-books that read PDF and HTML files. The earlier versions read simplified HTML and RB formats, no color or tables.

Our main site uses MicroSoft .WAV format sound files to suggest things you might want to click or try, as well as just for fun. But sometimes, if you have an invalid sound driver or other problems in your computer sound card files that affect playing the .WAV files, this might prevent you from seeing the web site because as soon as the sound file loads and trys to play on your computer, using the damaged or partly missing software driver, it "crashes" the website display. To cure it, re-install your sound driver for the installed sound card, from the original disk or CD, or download an updated driver from the website of the company who made your sound card. Then you will be able to see the main site and hear it as well. If this site is working for you but the main one does not, chances are it is a problem in your sound card driver software.

If one of our servers should go down, or if there should be a problem with the internet that prevents one from talking to another (they are in widely separated locations around the country), you may get an error message that has "ERROR 404", which indicates that the page or file was not found by your browser. Try again later, perhaps in a day or so. Most of the time, everything works OK. But from time to time, things happen! We always get it fixed again, as soon as we can.

Thanks for using our services. I look forward to helping you with your bullet design questions. It is always a pleasure to see another person achieve independence in the supply of projectiles, and perhaps launch yet another succesfull custom bullet operation!

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