Pitchin’ a Grizzly tent, part I
(Part II is here)
A couple of weeks ago a friend and I decided to check out the Grizzly tent sale. We live in the Redmond, about an hour and a half south of Grizzly’s HQ, so this was a bit of an undertaking. We took Scott’s wife’s pickup and plotted our plan of attack in the car. Scott was shopping for a studly new 8″ jointer, so I brought catalogs from Sunhill and others for price comparison. I didn’t have anything on my must-buy list, although I’m keeping an eye open for a bargain to replace my old Grizzly tablesaw.
A moment’s intermission: for those unaware, Grizzly is low-price tool importer. They’re one of the best importing Chinese machinery; they usually use american-made motors, and have their own engineers do quality-assurance. While the quality isn’t quite what you’ll find from an American-made tool, it’s not bad and a heck of a lot cheaper.
So the tent sale is their chance to unload the planer that rusted on the way from Shanghai, the tablesaw that has minor bloodstains from the troublesome Safety-Shield demo, and everything else that can’t be sold through normal channels. The good news is that the prices are crazy-low. The bad news is that there’s a lot of junk to sort through, and most of the good stuff goes in the first 15 minutes.
Yes, you heard me right. Brave souls line up at 8 in the morning, even camping out the night before, and charge in first thing in a fit of scavenging fury. They burst forth with literally tons of machinery, and the checkout/loading line can take an hour or more.
We got there at 10:00, inadvertently discovering a neat trick. If someone tears off the tag from a machine but doesn’t pay for it, after two hours, it gets re-tagged and you can buy it again. So while we missed the first round of deals, we did get first crack at all the re-tagged merchandise. As a rule of thumb, if you can’t be there at 8:00, be there at 10:00 (or 3:00 when they’ll haggle over what’s left).
More on the trip coming shortly…
(Unfortunately, it’s tough to know if a given tool is really American-made. For example, Delta and Jet both import some of their tools. Some of the very high-end guys like (I belive) Oliver don’t, but then again, their smallest jointer is 10″! Not exactly in the casual woodworker’s price range.)
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