Perhaps ‘Cheap’ is a candidate for my list of ambiguous words.

MichaelG.

Hear hear. My workshop is almost entirely populated by good quality gear that I bought cheap cheap secondhand at garage sales, including my Myford lathe. I started off with just my old apprentice days toolbox and now have a fully equipped workshop full of welders, torches, 20 ton press, lathe, grinders, vices, two drill presses, and boxes and boxes of hand tools, drills, reamers, micrometers etc etc. Even the workbenches are reworked kitchen benchtops. Storage shelves and cupboards also sourced for next to nowt.

For an investment of a bit of pocket change here and a bit there. It just took two years of getting up at 6am on Saturday mornings to be first in at the best looking garage sales and get the good deals. I am now better set up than some of the "professional" workshops I was paid to work in years ago. And I get to work with very nice British/Aussie/US made equipment. Always a pleasure.

I have only recently started buying brand new insert tooling and other specialised bits and pieces as I have reached the end of what is available secondhand locally in the non-industrial rural area that I live in.

Edited By Hopper on 26/04/2022 09:17:10

Don't understand why so many can't recognise Yorkshire frugality? Keep up the good work Steve.

Regards Ian.

A cheap lathe repaired or a cheap mill repaired is better than No lathe and No mill.

Some don't have any of the good iron machines around. One thing that I have learnt is that if the oil or lube is black or very dark in colour, that's because material particles are in that oil and it's wearing out.

I am testing the idea of using the linear rail grease from DMG as a slideway lube on my new to me cheap mill that is not really cheap after the upgrade rework etc. But is still cheaper and is in my shop as opposed to Not having a machine of that capacity.

Being lucky to get measuring tools at the right price is a good way to make the hobby budget go a long way. I was fortunate to be given a Tesa 0-30 mm micrometer that did not go. Turned out that a cable was damaged. So I cut it shorter by 1mm and pushed the cable into it's connector properly.

Cheap cutters and cheap drills that are not really up to do the job end up costing a lot more. Garage sales often have a few little gems if you are early on the scene.

Really good tool holders, especially Boring bars can really make the difference , especially in the insert life and sometimes in surface finish. My roughing inserts are finishing inserts that have some wear, but are not worn out.

Neil

Not everyone is as well served by local second-hand goodies as Hopper and Steve! Steve couldn't have made his video in my part of the world because my part of England is an engineering desert. Most local light engineering closed down nearly 50 years ago and the high-end survivors don't use centre drills or HSS! In consequence boot sales and auctions rarely have tools worth buying. Only battered rusty tools at inflated prices.

Steve's bargains come from nearby businesses that have either hit the rocks or are modernising or outsourcing. He's enjoying an opportunity which isn't reliable or sustainable in the long run.

As a schoolboy my first hobby was amateur radio and we all lusted after equipment costing new as much as a posh car or a house. Used to joke that "World War 2 was my playground" because huge amounts of surplus radio and other ex-military gear was dumped after the war. London's Lyle Street specialised in shops selling it and the two decades after 1950 were a golden age of electronic experimentation. By the seventies the apparently inexhaustable well of government surplus was running dry: air and sea fleets scrapped, regiments disbanded and all the depots were emptied. And equipment made in 1945 was well past its best-before date by 1980. The Cold War helped a bit, but surplus was never the same again. Today, radios that could be had for shillings and cannabalised, cost thousands and are highly collectable.

I think old tools will disappear in the same way as WW2 radios. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Dave

Dave you may have no idea what an engineering desert is. I can't even buy a piece of bright mild steel where I live, 1,000 miles north of the state capital of Brisbane, which is the state's main industrial centre. Other than a few mining industry workshops  that are only about 500 miles south of me, all there is around here is sugar cane farms and Barrier Reef and rainforest tourism. There are a few small workshops servicing cane harvesters and trucks, or reef boats, and one sugar mill.

I can't tell you how many dozens and dozens of garage sales I used to go to go to that if they had tools at all, were the usual array of carpenters and home renovators' tools, before I would hit "pay dirt" and find some engineering related tools. Very, very rare. And finding a Myford lathe was a once in a lifetime deal. It was only there because it was the most clapped out lathe I have ever seen, after 60 years or so of abuse in the local electric motor rebuilding shop.

So it can be done. As i said, all it took was getting up at 6am every Saturday morning and hitting as many garage sales as possible in the hope of striking pay dirt, for two years or more. But it was time well spent and was always a great social occasion getting around chatting to all sorts of people in the process. . My workshop would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to set up with all new equipment.

But then a few years ago, the already small supply of engineering tools seemed to dry up. Garage sales seemed to get smaller and fewer as more people used eBay, Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace to sell individual things for more money. I went for 12 months without hitting a single good garage sale with tools I needed, so gave it up in the end. So maybe you are right that the glory days of cheap used tool buying are drawing to a close. Or maybe it was in part because I already had most common tools so I was getting fussier in what I bought.

Jason, I used to buy up all sorts of tools that I did not need but looked like they could be handy one day, so when I needed them, they were there. Trouble is they sit unused so long I forget that I have them, or forget where I put them!

Edited By Hopper on 26/04/2022 11:04:46

Edited By Hopper on 26/04/2022 11:16:34

There are. Sometimes. But how often do you go to a bootfair with the intention of buying a good quality 50mm boring head and actually manage to do so? Usually you walk past a load of stuff that looks like it was just pulled out of a skip, pay £5 for a slime burger and go home with a couple of £0.50 Matchbox cars that remind you of the ones you ruined as a kid. On the rare occasions I see engineering stuff it's either the contents of another skip, or priced for the collectors who only buy pre-war Starret in original boxes.

Scouring the secondhand market for two years is a huge cost in time, and a fair amount of money. When I bought my first mini-lathe, I looked at several Myfords locally that were 2 to 3 times the price. They were worthless to me, as I had work to do that wasn't restoring a used-up piece of machinery.

A few years ago I was picking up new, unused end mills and slot drills, some were top quality carbide, from eBay, they were advertised as items from individual sellers who were not selling professionally. My Best Buy was a top quality 16 mm carbide end mill, totally unused, I think I paid no more than a fiver for it. I wondered how so many new milling cutters were available on line and came to the conclusion that people working in engineering must have been putting them in their pockets and taking them home and then advertising on eBay. I managed to build up quite a store of end mills and slot drills but nowadays the supply has dried up and very few are advertised and usually the price is the same as retail. Dave W

I think it's clear that what you can realistically get cheap depends on your needs/wants, the industrial activity and history of the place you live, and the balance between the savings you can expect and the time you're able and willing to spend bargain-hunting.

For myself, the best cheap thing I have is a big Record 110 vice with quick release that came to me for £2 when they closed the toolroom at ITT Creed in 1981, where I was working as a tool designer.

Then I have a 0.0005" x 0.300" Baty dial gauge set up for me in the later 80s by their chief inspector. It works very smoothly.

I bought a cheap B&Q bench drill in about 1995 which I still have. I think it cost about 25 quid. I set it to its middle speed and don't think I've ever changed it for whatever size drill I was using. It rumbles and clatters and I regularly threaten it with replacement when that irritates me, but it actually still delivers decent work for anything I've put to it.

I buy cheap bench grinders and don't mind replacing them every 15 years or so. 'Buy cheap, buy twice' ain't necessarily a bad way to be going on.

I’ve gone through three Dremel mini drills in two years, not used a lot either. Top money for junk.

I'd love to have the time and freedom to be a regular, or even a once-in-a-while, car-boot sale truffle hound; sadly, I don't. Having things delivered is really the only option for me.

I know I miss out on potentially fabulous serendipitous discoveries as a consequence, but at least the stuff I need is usually available somewhere on the Internet. Even then, though, buying what I need comes with no guarantee that I will have the time to make use of it anywhere near to the date of purchase.