Quote:
|
I may have some surplus mandrels that I can sell if you are interested. PM me your e-mail address if you are interested and I will send some pix of what I have.
|
That is unusually generous.
During my son's scouting days, one of the other adult leaders had a business down in Seabrook making industrial "chain" - the sort that various mechanical machines use, particularly automated vending machines. You know the one, you put in your money and push the button and the selector automatically goes to the location on an x-y grid and receives the product you bought and delivers it to the pickup door. A scout "This is your father's business world" field trip brought us to his door.
While we were there this mechanical engineer is scanning the equipment: much of his tooling was developed during the "flat belt era" of machinery and at least one machine was over 125 years old. All very interesting, antiques in their own right, and remarkable that they could still earn the owner a pretty good living.
Another thing I saw were "pallets" on the sideline shelving of the shop, each containing a similar machine perhaps only differing in details to what he had running at the moment on the shop floor.
"So what do you do with all the machines up on the sidelines - do they make a different size link or something of particular use but no current demand?"
"No" he says, "Those are my competitors machines I bought when he decided to retire. There are very few producers of mechanical chain in this market and I protect my market niche by buying up machines which otherwise might be used to compete against me."
One assumes they were bought for relatively small money compared to what it would be to develop such a machine from new, plus someone retiring isn't necessarily all that interested in a tremendous profit from such machines - they've already made the money.
And perhaps the seller supported someone else with which whom he had some empathy.
Good luck with the deal. Yes, it probably supports the hobby in the big picture. One of the downsides of specialization in today's world is that once the market need for that specialization is past - the information on what it takes to make that specialization work passes too. Maybe forever.
And that is too bad. Humanity shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel continually.
Joe K