is this crazy or not?

[SH]

I put a BRAND new B&D Sander on eBay, This sander is from 1991, never been used and still in the box.... and is 32 years OLD.

A person wins the bid at £7.00 and pays £2.99 for shipping.

I then go into eBay and print off a Royal Mail postage label for £2.99. I then print the Packing slip.

My jaw fell to the ground.... It appears I am mail £7.00 for sander

£14.10 postage (this is the 2.99 to the eBay Global Shipping Program Depot in Lichfield and the rest is the P&P to Poland. £6.61 for customs import charges....

So he's paid £7 for a vintage sander and over £20 to get it to his front door in Poland.....

Thankfully I don;t get charged 15% on the international postage or on the customs import duties...

And he's got to change the 13A rectangular pin plug for a 2 round pin plug before he can use it!

[Colin Bignell]

Perhaps he isn't planning to use it. He might have a B&D museum. Unused and in its original box it will be valuable to a collector.

Many years ago, I sold a surplus industrial continuous heat sealing machine on Ebay, to somebody in America. I pointed out that the price was in pounds, but dollars, it needed 240 volts and it was going to cost him more to ship it than to buy it, but he wanted it and was happy to pay. It seems he couldn't source anything that did the same thing in the same way in the USA.

[Theo]

£27 delivered isn't terrible value for a sander. And sometimes 'the old ones are the best omes'. Maybe he's got the same model that's just died and wants the same again. I have been known to do that with some item I like - at replacement time go for another of the same.

Vintage tools are definitely in demand in some quarters, with specialist auctions etc, although I'm not sure that's got as far as 1990s power tools yet.

I would have thought a user of a sander could handle that. (I've bought stuff from Germany and done the reverse)

Theo

[Fredxx]

If there's any doubt, ask before you send. Say there are no returns if he changes his mind.

He could just like the model, or perhaps he's replacing a broken one that has sentimental value?

[Tim Streater]

Chances are he hasd 240V at his house anyway. My house when I lived there had a 240V socket in the garage, specifically to run the washer/dryer, which was a single unit (though with separate washer and dryer), and was 240V (obvs).

[Colin Bignell]

He was buying it for his business. Would he have 240v in an industrial unit? If not, I assume he could use a transformer.

[Paul]

My kettle is receiving 122.2V right now.

My stove is receiving 244.4V right now.

Is it getting warm in here ? :-)

Paul

[Thomas Prufer]

Not recently?

I wanted to order some of Big Clive's pcbs to Germany: "Sorry, an extraordinary international postage cost increase has made it unviable to ship many of my PCBs and kits from the UK."

I think it's the fees the carriers want for customs and import duties, plus maybe the amount of trouble it causes if there is a hitch.

Thomas Prufer

[The Natural Philosopher]

I bought an oil painting from Poland that was about £200 shipped, I have seen worse for sale at £1000 Really good classical portrait but obviously painted a year ago at most. Probably there is no market for portraits in Poland

[The Natural Philosopher]

It's the EU punishing us for Brexit. Except it is punishing German exporters

[Davey]

Indeed, that is quite common, and also for the cooker. The normal fusebox is supplied with two phases, providing 240v, but each phase is put across to neutral/ground to provide two phases of hopefully balanced 120v.

[Jeff Layman]

As Tim noted, 220/240V is available in residences in the USA. It's just that it uses a split-phase supply of 110+110V (or 120+120V). So you could use most UK electrical devices in the USA without a transformer. What could be an issue is the 60Hz frequency instead of the 50Hz used here. Electromechanical clocks would run fast. There could also be an issue with core saturation leading to some overheating with transformers and motor windings, depending upon their design.

I would expect most businesses in the USA to have 240V single-phase available for lower-end high-power equipment. They would also have

120/240/480V three-phase.

[Brian Gaff]

So why cannot it be just sent direct to the person from yourself as a used item. Brian

[Robin]

A manager's been on a course where they preached the benefits of a strategy of "under promising and over delivering"?

[Paul]

That says there's a 600V standard for US/Canada, and a 480V one for US.

The entire continent is not one happy-go-lucky grid, and timekeeping and Hertz Maintenance are handled on at least two of the sections, separately.

For any businesses that are large enough, they have their own substation. And the voltage that feeds that, is whatever is appropriate for the power level. Two of the sites for my work, had their own substation. The more greedy of the two sites, all the infrastructure was hidden, so the residents could not see how wasteful we were :-) I never could figure out where the chiller plant was located.

We used to have an aluminium smelter near Niagara, and it had its own hydro station for generating power. The generator outputs ran at 25Hz, instead of 60Hz. That's been gone and shut down, for some time. The country still has smelters, but they're just not located there.

We must have had 25Hz somewhere else in the country, years ago, because my physics professor worked as an "electricians assistant", and the power systems they worked on were 25Hz. The light bulbs used to flicker at 25Hz. Which would surely lead to madness :-) The facility in Niagara, was never used for residential power. So that's not it.

Paul

[Davey]

At our "Guest House" in Shanghai, the lights in the dining room, and only the dining room, used to flicker at a speed that you could count. We never worked out why. If the room lights had done that, there would have been some suicides.

[Jeff Layman]

Were they siphoning power off Amtrak? ;-)

Or more likely something like this was this involved: