... just picked up a excellent condition 6" milling vice for £34 and a brand new swivelling 4" millng vice for £20...
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... just picked up a excellent condition 6" milling vice for £34 and a brand new swivelling 4" millng vice for £20...
... and a set of 10 pairs of 1/8" x 6" parallels in excellent nick for £15
Nice one Irving! gota love the bay !
I too love fleabay.
I just bought an MPG ( one of these ), a four axis version form a guy in deepest darkest Hong Kong. He seemed personable enough, always replied to my many questions promptly but always started his replies with "my good friend". Now where I come from, when someone refers to you as "friend" like that, doesn't always mean they are your friend and quite possibly you are in for a duffing so I was a little apprehensive. After much mulling, I clicked the "buy it now" button and sent my money off, fully expecting never to see it or my MPG alive again. Four days later a parcel arrives from Hong Kong, marked as "present" so as not to attract the feds, tee hee, and inside was my MPG and a little note saying that, sorry, they had run out of four axis and had sent a six axis one instead (selling on the bay for 60 quid more than I paid)and they hoped I would not be dissapointed. Dissapointed? Moi?
I learned two things.
1 NEVER judge a book by its cover
2 I can get things from halfway around the world faster than I can get them from the UK and at sensible prices. They don't ignore you and service seems to be pretty high up on their list of priorities. (MD take note)
End of rant. (feel better now)
Oh yes and the MPG is built like a brick outhouse, very high quality but my God the instructions are written in Chinglish, anyone know what a "Patulous" is because I have to be careful to wire it in so the original sculpt is in no way anti-interferetiaiai.
Jeff.
PS, Irving I am not in any way whatsoever jealous of you getting those vices:mad:
Generally speaking, I've also found that buying from Chinese vendors has been a pretty good experience.
I purchased some SBR16 supported rails and linear bearings from a Chinese vendor via eBay and am also well pleased. The total price for two 800mm rails, two 1000mm rails and eight carriages with linear bearings fitted was about £154, including postage. The parts arrived very quickly (a week quicker than some other parts ordered from MD at the same time). They were also exactly as ordered, packed well and of good quality.
I've now purchased about two dozen items from China and so far have always recieved really good service.
Jeremy
Basically you are dealing with individuals or agents who buy from the local Chinese manufactures and sell at a low margin.
The Chinese influx is making it hard for UK companies to deal on Ebay, and that is one of the reasons i wont be going back on ebay anytime soon.
you have made a saving, but not by as much as you think.
You were most likely lucky and not cought with the VAT and the Duty, if your were the cost would have been higher than buying from the UK.
This is a risk you take at point of order, and you dont know how much it will cost you till it is delivered.
Dealing with china is getting better all the time, but you maybe unlucky, if you have a faulty item, because they would expect you to ship it back to them for them to replace, and shipping 10KG and 1 meter long will cost you more than you are willing to pay.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeremy
Gary,
At the time I purchased these, the only UK vendor I could find wanted more than £400 for the same parts, so I thought I'd made quite a considerable saving even if I did get stung for VAT etc. I now realise that I could have bought these parts from you for around £183 inc VAT, which is almost certainly what I would have done had I known that you sold them, for just the reasons you've given.
At the moment, having bought quite a few items from China, I'm now prepared for a loss on one before too long, just based on the law of averages with things going wrong. Even so, I have to say that I'll most probably still come out on top, given the good fortune I've had so far.
I can understand, and sympathise, with UK vendors trying to compete with the Chinese. I doubt many consumers understand the risks, or even notice the often very high postage charges on ebay for goods from China. As far as I can see, the only way to compete with the Chinese ebay vendors is most probably to buy goods in bulk direct from the Chinese manufacturers, ship them by sea to save costs and hope that the quality is such that the return rate doesn't cause you to make a loss. All told a fairly risky enterprise, I would have thought.
Jeremy
PS: Now I know that you stock stuff I'll be buying some parts for the Z axis direct from you, as soon as I've finally decided what I need.
One thing i have come to realize is that if you do your research right the quality of products from China or Taiwan can be very good.
And you are right, for a UK company to compete with the Ebay chinese sellers is to buy in bulk.
You have to get it in by sea so you have to wait about 10 weeks, and then you get stung with the VAT when you bring it in, so unless you are VAT registered expect to pay £1500 VAT on a £10000 order.
You also pay the duty that can be about another 5%.
The cost to get it from china is not a lot, but you get stung with a lot of customs and port charges, and then a masive charge to get it from the UK port to your address.
This cost from the port is about 4 times the cost from the Chinese port to the UK port. (Go figure)
My last order cost me over £2000 just to clear it from customs.
I get asked all the time to add other products to our range, but we cant afford to spread ourselves too thin, because in this induestry word of mouth is the best advertisement, so we try to stock 90% of what we have in our range, with the other 10% either on the sea or in stock at another company.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeremy
Just to be clear here, I would never attempt to buy anything like a 1m long ball screw from China. I am not stupid and realise shipping chrges alone will be double the value of the item. I would certainly not risk the sort of money I've spent with Zapp on eBay purchases abroad. What gets my goat is when buying from UK companies, you almost think they are doing you a favour by selling you their goods. If Gary stocked a pendant even at 20% more than I bought mine from I would have bought it from him but sad fact is he don't sell 'em and they are as rare and costly as hens teeth when you can find someone who will stoop to sell you one. Even if I had been hit by the VAT, it would still have been MILES cheaper than I could have bought one here. As Gary says, it is a calculated risk but so is any purchase, UK or worlwide.
Not having a go at Gary at all, service has always been A1 and Zapp can't have too wide a range of stock in these times so he is forgiven for not stocking the exact items I want to buy ;).
Regards, Jeff.
I'm pretty familiar with the whole UK transport cost issue, as I've been involved in importing container loads of stuff from the US to here in the past. Like you I have always been staggered at the high charges from handling agents and internal UK transport - it always seems like money for old rope to me.
Last time I did a personal import by sea (a second-user Mistubishi Pajero from Japan) I avoided quite a bit of the cost by going down to the docks at Dublin and dealing with the paperwork myself. The only snag I had was getting my container down from a massive pile of several hundred of the things and persuading the dockies to put it somewhere where I could open it and drive the car out!
All told that was an interesting exercise in faith, as I bought the car, sight unseen, from a Japanese auction, relied on a Japanese agent that I didn't know to deal with the deregistration, export paperwork and packing into the container and had the excitement of opening the container doors several weeks later not knowing quite what I'd find inside!
Still all worked out OK and I even managed to avoid VAT and duty by temporarily registering the car in Eire, driving it over the border to NI, re-registering it there on NI plates and driving it back home to Scotland, where I then lived. At that time second hand imported cars were exempted from tax and duty in Eire, making it the obvious place to bring in goods from outside the EU.
Jeremy
I have spoken to Hedds about their encoders and noticed the Pendant in the catalogue.
But never got any further than that.
The only things i am going to be adding to my range in the next few months is rack and pinion, motor mounds and also looking at making Seig X# CNC conversion kits, but this will be once i convert my own, so god knows when that will be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Smiler
Pity about the pendant really, I always seem to be ahead of the curve where Zapp is concerned ;)
I sympathise totally on the transport costs issue. On Friday I ordered 2 lengths of 20mm x 6mm 304 stainless flat to make a simple carpet edging strip for a spiral staircase. Material came to 25 quid plus the dreaded. They didn't have it in Glasgow so it needs to be shipped to them, £30 please. Oh and there is another £30 to drop it in to Arran Haulage (company who delivers to the island) and then AH sticks on another £70 to deliver it to the island. 2 lengths of flatbar, £130 delivery and we haven't even picked up a hammer yet!
Gets even better if you need something galvanising. Delivery cost to Glasgow, delivery to the Haulier, delivery to the island, delivery back to glasgow for galvanising (and now as it is a finished job it is bigger so price spirals), delivery back to the island. The last job we sent over cost over a grand in just delivery charges (Small spiral staircase). It has got so bad that it is cheaper to use the highest grade stainless steel over here for gates and railings than to have them galvanised. Hauliers here blame diesel prices but we've noticed that since the price of fuel went down, their prices have stayed the same or increased.
And in case you don't know where we are, Arran is only 14 miles from the mainland, including the ferry journey I can be in glasgow in 2 hours from home, it's not like we are in the middle of the Atlantic.
regards, Jeff.
I used to be acquainted with a chap who, lived on Arran (we lived in Portpatrick, D&G, at the time). He had an arrangement with a chap on the mainland who collected and stored any delivery for him and he'd periodically pop over on the ferry and collect everything at once.
Of course, this only works if there's little urgency and there is already a need to make regular trips to the mainland. In his case, he ran a guest house I think, so had a fairly regular requirement to go ashore for major provisioning runs.
Now you've made me remember the chap, I'm struggling to recall his name, Roger something or other. As I recall he was Plymouth Brethren, so didn't drink, although he was fair company in the bar, all the same.
Jeremy