I am a blundering idiot

Bob , I go to the auction house right next to work every other Sat . Sometimes , but not often , do they have machinist tools and boxes . Last year they had 3 auctions with nothing but one individuals shop that had passed away . I ended up with quite a bit of his belongings including 4 wheelers and Kennedy boxes and various tools that I didn't need . :grin:

They had the system you mentioned above . I always stop in on the Friday before and give the auctioneer my high bids on the stuff I want . Always end up getting it at half the price I expected to pay . Most people who attend purchase to re-sell the items for profit , so I can go higher than them if I intend to use it . :encourage:
 
Yes, ebay has automatic bidding. You enter the maximum that you are willing to bid for an item. If someone overbids you, your bid is automatically incremented by the smallest increment allowed for that auction until the bidding exceeds your maximum bid. If you enter the absolute maximum that you are willing to pay for an item, no one can "snipe" you at the last second unless they bid higher than you were willing to pay anyway. You have to decide up front, being honest with yourself, what is the absolute max you'll pay for the item and hope no one wants it more than you do. If you're lucky, you'll get it for less than your max limit.

Tom
 
Placing your maximum bid on eBay usually plays out just fine - but sometimes you get into a game of 'chicken' with another bidder and that thought of 'I can get this for just a dollar more' escalates into higher than retail prices.

There are sites that automatically enter your best bid at the last moment so if there was a 'chicken run' you can avoid the mental stress. One such site is esnipe.com. You buy 'points' that are deducted only when you win a bid on eBay. Costs you a penny a dollar to do the sniping - and you don't have to be up and bidding at 3:14 AM for a shop widget. I've had good luck with it - YMMV

Stu

"It's 90% boilerplate, 1% real work, 9% WTF?" -Les Cargill
 
I use bidspotter a lot. They go and liquidate companies going out of business. When I first started I was use to a traditional auction. Tried to snipe something and found. No matter when you bid it resets the bid clock another 9 min. To give anyone the chance to bid again. The problem I see with this is it gives some time to think about the piece and find some jacking up a price that really doesn’t call for it. Should be snooze you loose just my 2 cents.
 
I have found my best deals on tooling and machines, by far, with going to owner run yard/garage/moving sales and with local Craigslist ads. It is just a lot easier to work out a good deal when there are only 2 persons involved with it. YMMV. Gotta get up early on Saturdays... :)
 
This is a beautiful nos Brown and Sharp indicator that was on ebay.
The auction ended and the guage sold for $41. It ruined my morning.
You're using flawed logic in order to feel bad about yourself...
You have no idea how high the winning bidder would have gone. The reason it stopped at $41 is because a third bidder had a maximum bid price of $40. For all you know, the winner may have been prepared to go to $200, and you'd have still lost if your max bid was less.

The point is, you pick a max price and walk away; if you win, great, if not, get on with things.
 
Bob, problem is some of us live in machinist deserts. Lucky if you can find anything close to a machine tool on craigslist much less in a yard sale.
Well, where I live is in many ways a machinist desert as well. The big difference between me and many others is that I am not in a huge hurry to get or buy something, and so I simply wait until it comes along at a price I feel good with. I have all the necessities that I really need to make many things, and can also borrow rarely used tooling from friends. Yes, sometimes I will buy something just because it is cool and the price is unbelievably low, and I do not feel stupid for doing that, either. I only do that if I feel that I can sell it for well more than I paid for it, at any time. However, I am also not so much of a "collector", who gotta have at least one of everything, or everything from a certain historical time period or manufacturer. One thread I do NOT watch here on H-M is "What did you buy today?" More like "What did you make without it?" I do not feel that I need to buy stuff just for the joy of buying it, I would rather feel smug because I made it without the special tooling or materials purchase. It seems that many of us want to do a project because it gives us an excuse to buy more new and shiny tools and materials. I start nearly all of my projects from "what can I find around here to make something like that?" If nothing, I usually wait until I find something cheap or free. To me this "sport" is far more about the journey than the bling. There is always something else I can be working on until the right thing comes along.
 
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