When sellers (dealers) are buyers (bidders)...
WoodburnBob
>When sellers (dealers) are buyers (bidders,winners) on Ebay, I notice.
On one hand, I come away thinking my ideas of price(value) are validated...sometimes. Also, I think I'm getting a chance to perhaps see a snapshot of defacto real-world wholesale prices according to those "in the know".
On the other hand, this kind of thinking may be stupid and wrong. It may simply be another insidious sign of slopomanic delusional disorder and mental illness.
So here's a case in point. What would you say a fellow who wants to make his living selling Mathieson infills ought to give for this Ebay example? What then ought he be able to get for it in his Mathieson retail shop at the corner of Front and Main? Don't get me wrong here. I have absolutely no ideas of this myself. Completely hypothetical.
If you go off to the listing, you'll see that one of the three terminal snipes was placed by Hans Brunner at $333...obvious and public disclosure. You'd find his site with a simple Google search. I've bought from him and have no complaints. (On sniping: I think it's the only rational way to bid...but I know it's an incendiary topic.) Almost by definition, I think of Brunner as a wholesaler competing for product in a retail environment. Is this non-sense?
If the winner is in the states, the total from Australia is $338 + $40 = $378.
On the plus side, the Norris blade is worth something in the range of $100 depending on remaining length. If you weren't keeping the plane and replaced the Norris iron with a cheap tapered blade you had lying around, you might be getting a $238 Mathieson in Australia.
The visible problems seem fixable. There's a fair amount of rust (pitting), the top of the bun is trashed, the handle is broken, and so it's elimated from the collector sweepstakes. But, rust comes off. Pitting: who cares? Trim up the bun timber. Cleaned and repaired, tuned and caressed, it should be a top notch "user" and companion.
The main bugaboo is the handle. But for the unstable fracture, it looks great. To fix it means gracefully getting the screw out. Good luck. Then you have all the little problems with crack/fracture alignment/clamping/gluing. And so on and so forth.
Whether buyers or sellers, wouldn't it be interesting to know exactly how the educated and shrewd go about fixing a price in their mind?