Penny Wise and Pound Stupid

I’ve decided to punish humanity with a tool rant.

Back when I still had a real Internet connection, I put a video up on Youtube. In the video, I fixed up a $15 Harbor Freight wood plane, just to see if I could make it work. I got it to function, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone else try it.

A commenter said I should buy planes at garage sales. That set me off. The bag of pet peeves ruptured, and now I must rant.

Garage sales are only good for three types of people: mentally ill hoarders who buy crap, young people who live in poverty, and professional shoppers who snap up the best merchandise and put it on Ebay and Etsy.

That’s it. I will explain.

Say you’re 45 years old, and you decide you want a hand plane collection. To do woodworking well, you really need 4 or 5 planes, and you’re better off with a dozen. Different planes do different things well. Block planes are good for tight spaces and breaking corners. Jointing planes are good for jointing, obviously. Smoothing planes are good for, well, smoothing. Rabbet planes make rabbets. You can’t buy one plane and make it do everything. You’re going to need a bunch of planes.

You’ve already blown it by reaching 45 without collecting any planes. Now you have to catch up. Say you start going to garage sales.

Look at the paper or the web. There are no promising sales this week. Probably. Most of the time, the sales you read about look really bad. Action figures with missing arms and spit all over them, plus things like lamps with torn shades. IKEA furniture that ought to be burned. Maybe you’ll see a good sale in a couple of weeks. You may find 10 sales a year that are worth leaving the house for.

When you go to these sales, 9 of them will turn out to be losers. The other one will have one or two decent items.

To get those items, you will have to get up before the sun rises and do some driving. If you show up an hour after the sales start, the things you want will be gone. Tools go fast. Every city now has a fleet of professional shoppers who raid garage sales as early as possible and take all the good stuff. If you’re not there at the start, you’re dead. And what if you have two promising sales on the same day? You can get to one early enough to score, but you’ll be late for the other one

If you get the items you want, they probably won’t really be the items you want. By that I mean you won’t be able to choose brands and models. Want to collect a set of Stanley type 13 planes? Forget it. You’ll have to take a type 11, a 1990 plane from Home Depot, a Craftsman…whatever happens to be available. You will eventually get items that do what you want, but you’ll have to settle.

If you insist on good tools, you’ll have your woodworking shop equipped in about 20 years. During those years, you will have had to struggle without important tools. You will have had to forgo a lot of projects. You will become farsighted. You may get cataracts. You may get arthritis in your hands. You may need new hips. You’ll feel less like getting things done. The TV and the shuffleboard court will beckon.

You’ll miss out on the fun you would have had if you had bought your tools as early as possible.

You may drop dead, and then other people will buy your tools at your wife’s garage sale.

Now, IF you’re 20 years old and you have no money, by all means, go to garage sales. You can’t even afford Ebay. Do whatever you can. Your shop will be up and running when you’re 35. Your income will increase, so in a few years, you’ll be able to shop like a normal person and fill in the gaps in your collection. You’ll miss out on a few years of having a fully functional shop, but when you get it together, you’ll still have your eyesight, and your prostate won’t force you to leave the shop every 10 minutes.

If you’re a professional shopper, again, go to garage sales. These sales are for sellers who are too lazy to use Ebay and get good money. Buy items for five bucks each and resell them for fifty. It works. But expect to have every weekend ruined for the rest of your life. You will be up with the chickens every Saturday and Sunday, driving like a maniac, trying to beat the other Ebay bottom feeders.

Garage sales are also good for people who are just bored. If you enjoy getting up in the dark and driving around looking for bargains, garage sales are for you. If you do it long enough, you will eventually run into a few great deals on things you actually want. Just don’t get the idea that garage sales can replace Ebay.

Everything I said, nearly, applies to flea markets as well as garage sales. Have you ever been to a flea market at one p.m.? Most of the good stuff is gone, and everyone is leaving. Flea markets aren’t quite as bad as garage sales, because there are serious vendors who have so much merchandise they don’t empty out early, but on the whole, you should really be there when the gates open.

I like online shopping. Ebay. Etsy. Craigslist. Facebook Marketplace. A new service called Offerup. You can see what’s for sale. You don’t have to drive ten miles to find out.

Ebay and Etsy are somewhat expensive, but the other services aren’t bad. They’re for people who are too lazy to use Ebay. They fully expect to get less money.

I recently sold my dad’s NordicTrack ski machine for $80. I probably could have gotten twice that much on Ebay. I don’t care. I wanted it gone. I was ready to give it to Goodwill.

When you shop on Ebay, you’re really paying other people to shop at garage sales, estate sales, and auctions. They get up early and buy stuff cheap and offer it online. You lie in bed and bid on it later. They perform a useful service, so they deserve some profit.

I’ll go out on a limb and say no one has ever put together a good wood shop–with quality tools–exclusively from garage sales and flea markets in less than 15 years. I don’t see how it can be done. There must be plenty of people who have bought 25% or 30% of their tools at garage sales in less than 15 years, but I doubt you can do 90%.

A lot of people say, “Go to garage sales,” like it’s a brilliant tip. How many of them practice what they preach? It’s particularly rantworthy when someone who works for a big tool-related website recommends garage sales. Dude; you get tools for nothing. Manufacturers give you tools in order to corrupt your reviews. You’re not running around every weekend, pawing through boxes of other people’s 8 tracks and Cabbage Patch dolls.

Here is what I say: keep an eye on online sources like Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, Offerup, and Etsy. Sign up for discounts on sites like MSC Direct, Travers Tool, and Wholesale Tools. After that, if you feel like puttering around with garage sales and flea markets, go ahead. You will find a few things you like, and you can add them to the tools you bought from sources that require less work and operate much faster.

In other news, I mastered my universe again today. I fixed my gate opener.

For years I fantasized about having a walled central Florida compound. Now I have a fenced northern Florida compound. Similar idea.

In fact, now that I think about it, I insist that everyone refer to it as “The Compound.” I’m also thinking of making everyone call me “The Colonel.”

I have an automatic gate. It’s a nice feature. It probably discourages thieves a little. It certainly prevents pedestrians from casing the joint. It’s not fun when it doesn’t work, however. After Hurricane Irma, I had to figure out how to disconnect the gate from the opener so I could leave it open.

A short time ago, a friend had a problem leaving The Compound. The gate would not open. I used the remote to help her. I figured it was a one-time thing. I was mistaken. It was stuck. It worked when I used the remote and keypad, but the sensor in the driveway was useless.

Driveway openers work using inductive loops. You put a big loop of wire in the ground under the asphalt, and when a vehicle goes over it, a current goes through the wire and alerts the opener.

Whenever you change the magnetic flux (magnetic field times the area, sort of) through a conductive loop, you get a current. This is how all of our electricity is generated. I’m not sure why a car moving above a loop generates a current. Maybe a car has a net charge or a magnetic field. Anyway, induction makes your gate opener work.

Now the question is bugging me. I’m Googling. It looks like gate opener loops are just metal detectors. You know how metal detectors have loops on them.

Okay, I found the answer. Inductive sensors aren’t passive. They have currents running through them all the time, producing magnetic fields. When a sensor gets close to a conductor, the field from the sensor induces currents in the conductor. This creates magnetic fields that come from the conductors, and the sensor detects these fields.

Lenz’s Law at work. I think. Ampere’s Law? Whatever. N’importe quoi. As Ampere would have said.

I wondered what could cause a wire loop to quit working, and the only thing I could think of was a broken wire. That would be bad. The wires are cheap, but someone has to come and remove the old wire from the pavement and insert the new one. They are embedded in slits made with diamond saws, and they are covered with tough sealant. I’m sure they’re not cheap to replace.

I called a few people, trying to get help. It was frustrating. The company that made the keypad kept me on hold for about four months. Repairmen said they could come by next week.

I’m not having random individuals walk into The Compound for a week.

I found a professional outfit that was willing to come by today, but by then I was on the warpath. I was Googling. I found out something interesting. Sometimes gate opener sensors have to be reset.

I took the golf cart (God bless the South) down the driveway, opened the gate opener box, and found a reset button staring me in the face. It works. I now have a functioning gate.

If you have a gate opener that doesn’t work, try to find the reset button before you do anything else. Try turning the power on and off at the circuit breaker. Try unplugging the sensor from the PCB and plugging it back in. If these things don’t work, and you can’t get tech support or a manual, call a repairman. Hope this is helpful.

Anything beats paying some doofus a grand for a wire you don’t need.