This is a loaded question.
Is it
safe in terms of
not being a scam? Tom isn't a scammer. If you buy a deck, you'll get a deck. When it arrives, it will probably function great at that time.
Keyword = "at that time".
But there's more to this story...
Many of us here, myself included, paid Tom a lot of money to refurbish our AG-1980P units. The refurb was 99% just a re-cap (replacing the capacitors), which we all knew. We just trusted that he'd do a good job. He conversed well in email, he had a lot of good info on his site.
Unfortunately, we later learned that he only replaced the so-called "bad" caps on a board, which was inexcusably ignorant, malicious even (ie, get repeat customers). Those caps were decades old, and should have
all been replaced. When one fails, the rest will fail shortly thereafter. We'd often get gaslighted, made to believe a deck re-failing was our own fault. Nope, it was his. He did a shoddy job, then wanted more money for another shoddy job.
I pissed away thousands of dollars on TGrant, and it still irritates me. In the end, I literally have nothing to show for it. All of the repairs failed.
Now, you may be thinking, "But LS, maybe you're being too hard on him?"
Nope.
Not only did he do a shoddy job at deck repair, he'd sell TBCs with "replacement" PSUs (aka AC adapters), or just the "replacements" by itself for $35+ shipped/taxed. The problem is he'd use $5 (or less) garbage no-name Chinese knockoffs that fail UL/CE. He wouldn't even splurge on the name-branded $10 PSU (APD, Honor, etc). Anybody that knows about TBCs knows that those bad PSUs spew noise into the image, and actually can cause cascade failures within the TBCs. No idea what he uses now, but I see he demands $75+ shipped/taxed for a PSU in 2024! That's insanity.
Others on this site have picked apart some of his other
cash grabs offerings, such as selling a stock food dehydrator for 4x the cost. He calls it a "tape baking solution". That situation was skewered in a thread here some months back, by others who have worked with tape baking. That thread has
Amazon link where to get it at normal cost. (I just saw where his site says "NOTE: This item requires 7 days processing prior to shipment" because he probably just orders it from
Amazon himself.)
I could excuse just doing sloppy work, but not the cheaping out on parts, not just reselling something from Amazon with a crazy mark-up.
As I often say, when a person does one thing wrong, they often do multiple things wrong. This is a perfect example of it. Taking this all into consideration, this is not the kind of person I want to deal with. No ethics.
So what's better, you ask?
After I started to let Deter repair my Panasonic AG-1980P decks, I never looked back. He's done a fantastic job with my AG-1980s, including fixing all of TGrant's botched work.
There's a few members of this site that see how awful the AG-1980P deck repair scene has gotten in recent years, and are now looking to offer their own services. Not just in USA, but in EU/UK as well. Not mentioning names here, as I cannot endorse them just yet (but may).
Beyond the AG-1980P units, all of Tom's stuff is overpriced crap, and most of it stuff that nobody should be using. Composite gear, ancient TBCs, etc. Even that new Amazon dehydrator is foolish. If that's the sort of stuff you're looking at, then I suggest discussing it in a thread first, to make sure you're not considering buying the wrong item.
For anybody curious, I have to let others re-cap my AG-1980s, because multiple sclerosis (MS) stole my fine dexterity. I can still do minors caps work, but the AG-1980 is a beast, lots of work, even for somebody with two perfectly functional hands. I could have screwed up the decks on my own, I didn't need to pay big bucks for somebody else to do it.
At this exact moment...
Deter is on break/vacation. He's my go-to for the AG-1980P. If I needed a deck, I'd just wait for him to come back before end of year. No exact ETA just yet.
Our (relatively) recent forum member
aramkolt has been learning AG-1980 refurb, and has some successes. I know he has a few extra units he's willing to sell. He does still need to prove himself, but somebody has to be that first customer willing to give him a try.
And then a forum member has his unit
in the marketplace. No details, no known lineage, so ask about the re-cap history before giving more than $1k on it.
mike 
