Lucky Day Thread

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
Kind of like the Jokes Thread.

Yesterday I found an air compressor in a trash pile. 3 hp motor and about 15 gallons of air tank. Not just 70 pounds of scrap metal! Fractured copper tube from the compressor head to the air tank and a butchered power cord. How lucky can I get? I already have the correct outlet in the shed!

Also in the pile: a (1) AA flashlight (torch to you Brits). White LED with a Joule Thief circuit. I compared it to similar stuff in a drugstore and found that the plastic torch next to it uses (3) AAA cells to make 18 lumens for $10 and gets 3 hours per battery while slowly fading out as the batteries get weak.

The 1 cell torch produces 19 lumens for $6 and gets 3 hours per battery while staying the same brightness until it suddenly drops dead. Besides that, it's all aluminum. You could drop it on concrete and run over it with your car without breaking it. I just love the way LED torches are getting better every year. Even more so when you find one for free!

I'll be in the shed today fitting a new copper tube on the compressor and polishing the electrical connections. :p
 

MrChips

Joined Oct 2, 2009
30,701
Yeah, I found a Garmin handheld GPS being thrown out.
It wasn't working. All I had to do was open it and replace the backup lithium battery.
 

Dr.killjoy

Joined Apr 28, 2013
1,196
Nice find and good luck with it and lets us know hpe it works out??

I picked up a gas powered air compressor for free because the motor pulley broke...
The same guy later I got a portable table saw and electric air compressor..
I got my BK 2120 20mhz scope for $26.01 shipped to my house ...
 
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tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
I was digging around in my shop the other day and found a old Millermatic 35 MIG welder that has been hiding for so long I can't recall how exactly I got it any more. :eek:

Anyway I also found my old Miller S21 wire feeder that originally came with my Miller Shopmaster 300. I spent most of the last two days reworking the old Millermatic 35 to be a compatible power source for the S21 feeder unit.

After that some more digging brought out all the heavy cabling, gas regulator and hoses I needed to refit the two together plus a mid sized helium tank that I switched over to being a CO2 tank that I can refill off the 50# liquid CO2 tanks I get every year or so.

All said and done I have a nice old style MIG unit I can take over to my dads place to have as a spare for doing welding work over there.

Not bad considering its a 200 amp capable MIG system all made up of old used parts and at best $50 in new parts to repair the power cord and the odd Miller MIG gun I had that as with the welder I cant quite recall as to where it came from either!

Granted the odds are once my brother finds out about it it will probably spend more time at his place and who knows how many of his friends places than dads. Oh well it was kind of intended to be a loaner machine anyway. :rolleyes:
 
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MrChips

Joined Oct 2, 2009
30,701
Back in my younger days someone threw out a vacuum cleaner (hoover for you brits) two weeks after Christmas. There was no suction. The hose was all clogged up with pine needles from trying to suck up leaves from the Christmas tree. All it took was some persuasion with a broom stick.
 

Brownout

Joined Jan 10, 2012
2,390
It's been a long time since I was that lucky to find something outright. But I did find a great deal on a refurbished Dell dual-core 2.4GHz laptop running Windows 7 for around 200bucks. It arrived yesterday, and it leave my old XP laptop eating dust.
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
Speaking of which.
Last year I picked up a pair of Panasonic CF-29 Toughbook laptops for cheap. One worked but needed software,which my computer tech brother got me set up with for free, and the second one needed a hard drive and DVD drive.

All said and done I got the pair for around $150 and spent $150 more getting them both functioning and loaded to better than new specs including the set of 320 gig hard drives in them that I had laying around as well. :D

I have to say that I love the 4 - 6 hour average battery run time they get when doing light work with them too! :cool:
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
No!

I use one in the living room and have the other in the bedroom and am thinking that one more for the shop would be handy. :cool:

Granted make me a really good offer and I may consider it though. One does have a touch screen! :D
 

Thread Starter

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
I did find a great deal on a refurbished Dell, and it leaves my old XP laptop eating dust.
I had to move out of XP a year ago. Then, 2 months ago, somebody left a quad core Vista machine on my front porch. I'm going to move into it...any day now. Tired of hearing the fans rev up on the dual core Vista machine.

Meanwhile, out in the shed, I tried the old, "fill the tubing with water and it won't kink" trick. It worked. Not perfect. The tubing is very oval, but it's a tube, not a blockage. I wound 1/2 inch O.D. copper tubing around a propane tank. Here are pix. Lead solder was good enough to seal the ends. Keep an even tension to get all the loops the same diameter. You can see where I missed one a bit.

I also started a new thread for this so it would be easier to find.
 

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strantor

Joined Oct 3, 2010
6,782
Friday was a day; could be a lucky one or an unlucky one.

My wife is going to give birth sometime in the next 3 weeks and then there will be two baby carseats in the back of her car, with a 7 y/o squashed between them. So we need something with a 3rd row, but my wife is terrified of the prospect of driving anything larger than her corolla. No Tahoes, Durangos, or minivans, and she put the kibosh on all the 3rd row crossover/mini SUVs we looked at, except the 2009 Honda Pilot (2010 and newer is bigger). I couldn't find one of those with low miles.

Then we found the Mazda5. I've never seen one of these. It's like a minivan, shrunk down and crammed onto a sedan chassis. It has absolutely no storage room, but it drives just like her corolla and has smaller blind spots than my Prius. We had a winner.

Since Mazda isn't a name that I immediately associate with exceptional quality and dependability, I wanted to make sure to get one with very low miles and a very good warranty. I searched around and found a 2013 model with 20Kmiles, selling for <$15K (>$3000 below blue book). We went Monday and looked at it, and it was super clean. I could not tell it was used at all, but it was not "certified pre owned" for some reason. It should be, IMO for being so new and with low miles. I inquired why it wasn't, and the answer was something to the effect of "It's up to the general manager what gets certified and what doesn't. He decides what is cost effective to certify and what isn't. If you want us to certify it, we can do it for $1500." That seemed a little weird, but I didn't know what to think of it. I am automatically suspicious but I don't know what to be suspicious of.

So we left and came back on Friday. I asked to see the CarFax, which revealed that it was a rental car previously. We took it for a test drive and I found some documents in the glove box from the previous owner (Hertz rental in GA) documenting some damage to the car ("deep scratches and dents all over, radio damaged.") I think I know now why it isn't certified, and why it sat for a week without selling, at 3K below below blue book. Someone took out their aggression on it, and common wisdom is to avoid rentals like the plague for this very reason; I know this. They probably got the car at rock bottom price and invested quite a bit into fixing it up. They probably got to a point where investing any more money into it (by certifying it) would make it no longer profitable since people expect to pay rock bottom price for a rental.

So I thought about it, talked about the warranty. For a certified car, for $1300 you can buy an extended 100Kmile bumper-to-bumper warranty. $1500 for the certification + $1300 for the extended warranty, still puts me out the door below blue book, AND with a warranty that exceeds original manufacturer's warranty by 70Kmiles. If I were to buy this from an individual, the bumper-to-bumper coverage would expire in 10Kmiles.

So I bought it. It may have been a stroke of genius or stupidity. We will see. Theoretically, the warranty should protect me from any ghosts of its previous life. Hopefully, none of those ghosts will rear their heads and my wife will have a dependable vehicle that gets her where she needs to go for a long time.
 

inwo

Joined Nov 7, 2013
2,419
Meanwhile, out in the shed, I tried the old, "fill the tubing with water and it won't kink" trick. It worked. Not perfect. The tubing is very oval, but it's a tube, not a blockage. I wound 1/2 inch O.D. copper tubing around a propane tank. Here are pix. Lead solder was good enough to seal the ends. Keep an even tension to get all the loops the same diameter. You can see where I missed one a bit.

I also started a new thread for this so it would be easier to find.
Now if you were here, you could set it outside for a half hour and get the flats out.:eek:
 
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