Help me spend $1250

Not to derail several pages of wonderful and very informative grinder discussion, but I had to pos this up here.

Remember when I first posted and everyone said lights were important? Looky what I found!!

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What you are seeing there is my little Blazer stuffed to the brim with lights. One of the hospitals in the town I work for is remodeling. They had about 50 of these lights stacked in a dumpster last night. I had to go all the way to the CFO for permission, but I got all I could take! All of them are four bulb fixtures. And, they still had the lights in them!

Total haul:
9 4 ft fixtures with bulbs
9 2 ft fixtures with bulbs
12 4 ft bulbs by themselves
15 2 ft bulbs by themselves

Pretty good for free! I will have to invest some in some wiring and switches and hanging chains, but I saved how many hundreds of dollars being a scavenger?


Ps, my wife is embarrassed by me. However, saving that much money kind of offsets it a bit. Lol
 
Water crawl, I'm heading back tomorrow and seeing if they are still there. If so, I'm taking more! It's not am auditorium, but my shed is huge (40x70) and I'd like to light all of it eventually. I only use about 40x30 of it right now, and really only 20x30 for my knife shop area, and that's where all of these lights are going. You guys think 9 big and 9 small are enough? :D

If they are 4 feet long, I can fit 4 across in two rows, then the one remaining large and nine small lights as accents on every piece of machinery in the shop.

Nah, 9 large isn't enough. I would like at least 12, and 16 would be better.
 
YES! That's a GREAT score. Much of my shop is lit with the same type of fixture. I scored 4 of them for free one time, and another was given to me by a friend. If I had one more, I'd be set... always on the lookout for this stuff.

Um... 40x70? Good lord. Lots of room to expand there!
 
Went back again today. (just left actually) I salvaged another 9 4 foot fixtures with bulbs, 6 2 foot fixtures with bulbs, 10 bare 2 foot bulbs, and 8 bare 4 foot bulbs.

Someone else do the math on the totals, I'm tired from carrying all these dang free lights! :D
 
Salem, if you want to make a cross country road trip, I'll give you TWO! Then you'd be really set. Lol :D
 
Yeah......dang wives. Always wanting "reasons" and "justifications" for doing something. What's wrong with going halfway across the country to meet a guy you've never met just to pick up a $50 light? Jeez, they'll never understand. :D
 
I've only heard guys from places like Australia refer to a 40'X70' building as a "shed" !!! :eek: :p :)

Amazing score on the lights. More is always better. I had almost that much light in my last shop which was only about 22X24 or so.

That's one thing I'm not looking foward to with the new shop, is getting it lit the way I want. I could easily burn up $3 to $4k in lights.
 
I keep telling my wife (who is impressed at my scrounging abilities and slightly embarrassed by my scrounging abilities) that even at $30 apiece, I saved ~$700 on fixtures and at least $175 on bulbs alone.

Of course, I'll have to spend ~$75 on wire and wire nuts and assorted chain, wood, and stuff to hang them, but don't underestimate my scrounging abilities for that stuff either. Lol
 
PT Doc said:
With such a wonderful savings, kmg is in the cards right?
Click to expand...

It's not so much a savings as it is a getting stuff for free. I wasn't planning on upgrading my lights right now other than piecemeal over the next couple years. Now I get to do it for free!

Btw, I went back again today and got 8 more 4 ft fixtures with bulbs. I'm going to sell a few and use the money to buy romex wire to get these things hung. I'm going to view this as a challenge to relight my shop completely for free. :D

As an interesting aside, I priced the pieces of steel needed to make a KMG clone. Locally would have been right at $200. However, just the drill bits and taps were going to be ~$100, so that idea was out. Then, one of my coworkers was describing how her husband lasered her out a decorative sign from steel and how he's always making things for her out of steel, etc. Ohhhhh, that's right! He is a boss at a CAD laser plant thingy. Soooooo.......I sent him the nested CAD file for the EERF grinder. He's going to "see what he can do." :D
 
medicevans said:
It's not so much a savings as it is a getting stuff for free. I wasn't planning on upgrading my lights right now other than piecemeal over the next couple years. Now I get to do it for free!

Btw, I went back again today and got 8 more 4 ft fixtures with bulbs. I'm going to sell a few and use the money to buy romex wire to get these things hung. I'm going to view this as a challenge to relight my shop completely for free. :D

As an interesting aside, I priced the pieces of steel needed to make a KMG clone. Locally would have been right at $200. However, just the drill bits and taps were going to be ~$100, so that idea was out. Then, one of my coworkers was describing how her husband lasered her out a decorative sign from steel and how he's always making things for her out of steel, etc. Ohhhhh, that's right! He is a boss at a CAD laser plant thingy. Soooooo.......I sent him the nested CAD file for the EERF grinder. He's going to "see what he can do." :D
Click to expand...

SOunds like a plan. At some point you must put a value on your personal time. Some would say spending 35 hours is worth saving $200. If you simply do not have the $200 then it works. If you have other things that you could be doing then those hours spent saving money were costly in one sense.

Let us know how the laser cutting costs look.

I'd like to see someone figure out how this KMG horizontal modification was done and make it available in plan form:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ-49s6ssE8

Good luck to you.
 
Wow ptdoc, lots of stuff to reply to.

1. About the issue of time vs money. You are absolutely 100% correct. A lawyer that can bill $200/hr should not be making a grinder that takes 8 hrs to build when he only saves $300 doing it himself. In fact, even someone that makes $15 an hour would have to do the math if they don't like building stuff or would rather make knives than build grinders. I happen to be on the more time than money end. I have five kids and am a paramedic. Not a lot of fat left there for toys or dad's playtime. I don't really even have that much time. In essence, it just takes me longer to do something than most people. It will take me two months rather than two weekends to put the GIB or EERF grinder together. However, it would take a year or two to save up the extra to buy a KMG completely built.

2. That horizontal KMG mod looks fairly straight forward. You'd need to run your motor below the grinder (like a table saw) on a rigid mount, then just make a pivot point on the side of the KMG baseplate with a piano hinge. Weld or screw a couple "feet/legs" to the side of the uprights or the tool arm socket for the grinder to sit on when it's in horizontal mode. Not terribly difficult to figure out how it was done, but I don't have the CAD drawing skills to make plans.
 
Jhoover, thanks. I'll send an email in a bit.

Sooooo.......I got greedy and went back AGAIN for more lights. Now all that's left in the dumpster is junk. :D

Total haul (for real this time):
26 4 ft fixtures
15 2 ft fixtures
27 4 ft bulbs
20 2 ft bulbs.

Not bad for free. I'm selling some on craigslist to finance the needed wire and other stuff.




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I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.981994,-88.260228
 
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