Hey JP,
I¡¯ve purchased a number of machines without seeing them in person first. If I remember correctly, 3-4 unisaws, 2 PM72¡¯s, a Martin t75, a Martin t17, a 12¡± grizzly jointer, an Oliver 232, a northfield Unipoint, Felder KF700, a 500mm Italian jointer, and a Laguna LT20. Bunch of festool stuff as well. It all depends on the deal and how competent you are at assessing something through crappy photos and talking to the owner. There¡¯s some stuff that you just buy and assume the risk because the deal is good enough. For example, both of those vintage Martin saws cost me $500+ shipping. In both cases, I almost didn¡¯t care if the machines ran, because I could spend $2,000+ repairing them and still be in good shape.?
By far the biggest issue with remote transactions is rigging/transport. You might get lucky and have a seller with a forklift or similar on site to handle the loading for you, but that¡¯s only the case half the time. The other half you are on your own and it sucks. Then you have to worry about some monkey carrier jacking up your machine in transit. Finally, the day of delivery you also have to dedicate the day to being on call waiting for it to arrive. One of the only times I used Uship, the guys came at 2 in the freaking morning. I actually think I unloaded the Martin t17 at 2am. It¡¯s one of the reasons I rarely use that crackhead service.?
What are you looking at? As you can tell, most of my remote purchases were potential project machines where the risk was fairly low. The Felder is the one example of it being an ¡®expensive¡¯ machine where I would have been in the hole had anything been damaged/missing. Thankfully, it came from an old doctor that barely used it for 10-12 years.?
Patrick
Has anyone bought a machine without seeing it? Did it go well, why or why not? What would you do differently?
