When you get really fucked up on that hobby lifestyle, you'll soon find yourself in a strange new place. Industrial auctions can give you all the oddball professional-grade tools that you've always dreamed of, often at a fraction of the price. Are you an accomplished hobby welder? Probably you have always wanted a UV-reactive radio cranfondulator with which to inspect your wire for sharkbite oxides, but it just isn't justified because all you do is fix the exhaust on your shitty Celica once a year. At an industrial auction, maybe you can get one for five dollars. And that's when the fun begins.
As we all know, good tools are big tools. Even big-brain stuff like electron microscopes are large enough that they need a forklift and a buddy with an intact lower back to move. Getting all that shit out of the filthy warehouse or partially-collapsed office building is a task on its own. Sometimes you need to buy new tools just to move it: good thing you're at an auction that sells stuff like cranes, forklifts, and low-mileage/high-hour pickup trucks with an inexplicable thick layer of coal dust on every surface. Make sure to check the return policy.
So you got it home, and now everything's easy, right? Not so. You see, when a big business buys a new piece of industrial equipment, it usually comes with some assistance. Technicians, or at least a single-page badly-photocopied manual telling you where to plug it in. As such, your first project quickly becomes: how in the seven divine hells of AliExpress do I get this thing to work?
Resurrecting this ancient beast of commerce is not quite as simple as a consumer product. Consumer products are, by definition, popular. Really good tools? They may have made like ten of them. There, one quick web search can rapidly locate thousands of arguing morons who have strong opinions on how to set it up. No: if the company that made it even still exists, the best you can hope for is an email from the current engineers asking you to take a bunch of pictures of it because they've forgotten how to make one run. Then you have to bribe an electrician to do something that is "not advised for houses" to your house, just so you can power it.
Now you can have infinite hobby joy. This massive, overcomplicated, insanely expensive machine is at your fingertips, and you can finally check off that annoying task you've been putting off for the last couple of years. You know, this whole thing was so easy, why don't we go back to the auction next weekend and see if we can get a meta-masticating crombopulator to install right next to it?
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