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Mexican at auction today made out like bandito

  • Thread starter D. Thomas
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D. Thomas

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I was at an auction in Lakeland, FL today where some of the items were at the plant's Mexico location. The auction was done "ballroom" style where you inspected what you could beforehand, but the actual bidding was done sitting in a room with slides on a screen.

Man it was frustrating watching the machines in Mexico go for almost nothing. As Acer vertical mill, the type slightly larger than a Bridgeport, looked fantastic...just a couple of years old maybe...went for 200 bucks !! Decent looking "round dial variable" Bridgeport with the current model Acurite DRO went for 500 bucks, 5 ton bridge crane that looked like brand new, 500 bucks...and on and on...

Naturally this one guy in the audience speaking Spanish on his cell phone bought most of it.

Good auction for me (and many others) though....they screwed up and added a 1997 Miyano VMC to the auction just the day before...so it wasn't even in the catalog and they had no picture for the internet bidders. Like brand new, hardly used. Won't say what I paid but I got it $5,000 less than I was willing to pay....that really doesn't suck at all, huh ?
wink.gif
Heck, I even upgraded a notch from my usual Motel 6 digs after that. I somehow resisted The Hooters Inn, right next to Hooters, however.

I guess the moral of this little tale is you never really know for sure what's going to show up at an auction, and that even experienced "large plant" auctioneers are complete idiots sometimes....often to one's advantage if you're quick to react.

I feel ambivalent about the experience however, as I met many of the employees who were just super nice guys, and one or two of them admitted the whole affair was quite depressing. They're not going out of business, but quite a bit of downsizing in the air bag manufacture business.

Manufacturing is on the rebound of late according to government figures...but who exactly....medical, hot tubs, tires, toothpaste....???
 
Don,

You wrote, "Manufacturing is on the rebound of late according to government figures ..." You gotta remember we are coming up on an election year -- according to the government (aka Bush and all other Republicans) everything good is on the rebound and everything bad is on the decline.

As for the auction, sounds like you did well. Auctions like this makes up for all those embellished, ill-run, over-publicized ones that you have attended.
 
Off topic, but I purchased my Sheldon 11-1/4" lathe in Matamoros, Mexico in 1994. At that time, lots of manual machine tools from the US were being purchased by maquiladora plants in Mexico. The maquilas began in about 1992 in Matamoros, and there were 50+ of them by 1995, all in need of maintenance repair machines. When the peso was devalued in late 1994, some real nice manual machines could be had CHEAP. My lathe had just come from a Chicago dealer, and had not yet been used in Mexico. Cost $1,500 at the time which I considered a deal! That was BC - before the Chineese invasion and before Ebay. Maquilas are a wholly owned subsidiary of a US or Canadian company, and equipment can be taken across the border for use in them w/o any duty. They brought it back into the US and I took delivery in Brownsville. I think some of the Mexican maquilas have moved to China too!
 
"Manufacturing is on the rebound of late according to government figures...but who exactly....medical, hot tubs, tires, toothpaste....??? "


Sounds like you guys all get the Lloyd Graff faxes?

(He's a good fella.)


BTW, I was at a dovebid style sale like that this summer. I hated it! Would have been a little better had they had the sale piped into the shop, but you couldn't walk out and look at stuff for fear you wouldn't get back in time for whatever you wanted. Internet auctions SUCK! (Can I say that here?)

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

[This message has been edited by Ox (edited 11-05-2003).]
 
I don't know about you guys, but our busines is sure up. All of the programmers are working 60-70 hour weeks with no end in sight. We have a lot of machines in the shop that are up for "keep manned" which is 12 hour days & 7 days a week. I have had to come in the last 2 weekends with machine problems. I got about half way home last night before I got called back in.

We'll be looking to send stuff out again.

JR
 
Dovebid auditorium auctions are really boring, hard to see what is ahead, no way of evauluating surprizes, etc. Must pay off for the seller to be able to get a wider exposure but takes the fun out of it.
 
JRIowa What kind of work do you guys send out? We are a small CNC job shop and have lots of capability for a shop our size. Check out our website and keep us in mind when sending out work for quotes.
http://csm-mfg.com/


Thanks
cobb
 
Manufacturing isn't showing any recovery that I've seen. I do indeed wonder where these figures come from.

CNC isn't the only thing that displaces jobs. Ordinary manual machinery can sometimes enable entry-level young low-pay workers to accomplish what a skilled man could, and quicker. I don't really begrudge machinery moving into the scene, because it's this country that ultimately benefits from the higher productivity.

Funny how foreign prescriptions by licensed doctors are tough to deal with in this country. No way would this stuff be let in to compete with domestic. Kinda makes you see what factions the laws cater to......
 
Ox, I know exactly what ya mean about being afraid to leave the "ballroom" to go check on something. Even if you only need 10 minutes to check on something and they have 100 lots to go, it may turn out that 80 of the 100 are all the same thing and they group em all together as one lot and then you're screwed. This particular auction was even worse in that they had so many items added at the last minute that you couldn't even go by the catalog, so you were afraid even to go get a hot dog, as you might find out you just missed the deal of the century when you got back
eek.gif


Still, in this particular case I can't even ~think~ about complaining (and you know I love to complain
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) as it worked to my advantage big time. If we were all standing around the Miyano VMC that they were too slack to even get a photo of, I would have had to bid many thousands more than I did.

Still, this situation is pretty rare. One has to go to many, many auctions before one finally "lucks out" like this. As George, so wisely alludes to, I've been to many auctions, driven thousands of miles, for absolutely nothing...but eventually one does get lucky.
 
Cobb,

Sorry, but your equipment is a little small for most of our work. Nice shop though.

Most of the work of that size, is in our facility in Mexico or Maylaysia. We do the big stuff and specials here. Just got in 6 pieces of pipe. 48" dia. by 5' long. They each need to have about 1000 holes drilled in them. Think of a really big air muffler!

All 4 of our VTLs are backed up, the smallest is a 60". We have 3 large HBM's that are running 24/7. We have 1 special machine that does the drilling for the large stuff like above that is 24/7. I have been trying to keep a special grinder running that there is only one of...spindle bearings puked today.

Besides all of that, we just were informed about another big order that's coming.

These are companies that have'nt spent a dime since 9-11 and are spending it now. I just hope that the rest of the ecconomy starts going like we are.

JR
 
Cobb, could you post a picture or two of some of your equipment? As I only use the small stuff I love to see some of these larger machines at work.

Charles
 








 
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