Metal lathes and Auctions
I don't know what it is about people at Auctions but the presence of a Metal Lathe brings out the impulsive buyer in them. I have been to Machine Shop auctions where people know what they are bidding on and the prices are reasonable.
What prompts this post is that most manufacturing businesses will usually have a Lathe or a Mill to help with the repairs. In many cases, when the business shuts its doors and calls in an Auctioneer, the business owners and employees will have cherry picked the good stuff so what is left behind, unless it is specialized machinery like today, is generally not first rate stuff.
At today's auction was a 15 year old predecessor to this piece:
This is a
combination Mill/Lathe from Grizzly Tools and it sells for just under $1,000 including a couple of chucks, some centers, the change gears and a face plate.
The unit at auction today had a patina of rust all over it, the wheel to move the crossslide spun freely with no motion of the crossslide, there was a good couple hundredths of backlash on the carriage, no chucks, no tooling, no change gears, faceplates, nothing...
Yet some poor fool paid $600 for it! The machine was useless for any sort of precision work, only useful for the roughest of machining. You would probably be hard pressed to hold your accuracy to the nearest tenth of an inch.
If I ever want to get serious about making money, I'll just buy up a bunch of clapped out machine tools and hold me an auction...
Posted by DaveH at June 24, 2008 8:49 PM