Danger! Offensive comments ahead!
Posts tagged auctions
More Internet Auctions
Jan 12th
One thing I forgot to mention is that even though the stuff I bought was used, older, and has been superseded by more recent models, I did some research and the current models of the stuff I bought are *not* any better in terms of capabilities, they just do what they do faster (1-2 seconds instead of 2-5 seconds for the stuff I bought) and have prettier LCD displays. The significant stats, such as how much mass capacity they have and how accurately they measure that mass (these are mostly all digital balances) are the same for the older equipment I bought and current model line equipment. Having said that, I got all this stuff for 5 cents on the dollar compared to new prices of the replacement models today. I got 6 digital scales, one lab shaker, and 9 calibrated weight sets. New prices for all of them would exceed $40,000. I paid $1,500. Auctions fucking rock! I actually don’t need 6 digital balances, nor 9 weight sets. I plan on selling 4 of the balances paired with 4 weight sets on EBay. I’m hoping to get my entire investment back that way, making my two balances and lab shaker free.
Internet auctions…
Jan 12th
No, I’m not talking about EBay type auctions. I’m talking about real, honest to God, people sitting in a room, auctioneer drumming up bids type auctions that you can attend over the Internet. Lots of people (especially ones planning on bidding on lots of stuff and needing to check it out first) go in person. Some people (like me, who only wanted a few items and had a limited budget) attend over the internet. They had this custom app that connected to their server, showed you which item was currently up for bid, allowed you to do real time bids over the internet, and showed you in real time bids they accepted from the floor. It was waaaay cool. In addition, they had a 1-800 number you could dial into and listen to the auctioneer as he did his thing. It was funny to hear him say things like “Internet, are you done? Any more?” and sometimes when no one from the floor was bidding on something and it was just internet bidders he would say something like “Well, I’ll let the internet bidders do their thing until there done. In the mean time, have you guys tried those chicken sandwiches? They’re great!”
Anyway, I attended one of these on Dec. 11th. I won some items. I didn’t want to fly down to retrieve my items since they were in Manati, Puerto Rico, so I hired a rigger to box them up and ship them to me. I asked him to get me tracking numbers. Well, he kept saying he shipped it, but never once gave me a tracking number. After three emails, probably six or so phone calls, and two weeks, he STILL hasn’t gotten me any tracking numbers. However, the shipping company called me this morning to say “Your crate arrived in the port of Miami and is ready to be shipped to your address. Is it a home or business address and do we need to bring a truck with a lift gate?” So, my stuff is finally about to be delivered, and my stress over the fear that this guys just took my money and left my assets at the auction site to be thrown away, given to someone else, whatever have finally been allayed no thanks to the guy I hired and paid $820 to ship my stuff. You would think for $495 packing/handling fee (+$325 for the actual shipping charges for the total of $820 I paid him) he would have been a little more responsive, but I guess not. Am I a sociopath for fantasizing about flying to Puerto Rico and blowing up his car or something like that as revenge for him taking my money and doing nothing (assuming that my stuff never arrived and I gave up hope after a suitable period of time had passed)?
No more itty bitty freeze drying runs…
Nov 6th
Freeze drying is actually an expensive process, energy wise. It consumes large amounts of energy to generate both the cold and the vacuum needed. However, once you’ve got the vacuum and the cold, neither of these items are strongly tied to the amount of stuff you are freeze drying. And the drying process proceeds at a specific speed in the stuff being dried regardless of how much is there. So, the more stuff you can get in your chamber, the less it costs on a per unit basis to do the drying. I’ve been doing very small runs of drying using a bench top freeze drier. It only had a roughly 5 1/2″ diameter tray that could only be piled up with about 1″ deep of stuff. Well, that’s no more. I still have the bench top unit, but I plan on getting rid of it. Instead, I bought and reconditioned a roughly 30 year old unit (that was in fabulous shape for its age…) that has 4 shelves, and each shelf has a 12″ x 17″ x 2″ deep tray for holding material. I fired it up for its first real run tonight. I expect it to take a day or two to complete the run, but instead of having a few tablespoons full of product when it’s done, I’ll literally have multiple cups of stuff.
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- Upper portion of unit with bench top freeze dryer sitting on top for comparison
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- Whole machine
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- Contents of a tray currently being dried
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- An unused tray in my freezer, shows how bif these trays actually are