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That old sifting screen I inherited didn't save me a dime
I found an old sifting screen in the back of my uncle's shed and thought I could use it to save money on cleaning up our sand. Took me a full Saturday to rig it up and try to get it working with our machine. The screen was too small for our throughput and clogged after just two loads of sand. Ended up wasting a whole day and had to buy a proper screen for $180 anyway. Has anyone else tried using old equipment just to have it cost you more in the end?
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david_walker972mo ago
@the_john nailed it. The time is what really hurts. Sometimes you just gotta know when to cut your losses.
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fisher.jessica2mo ago
The 180 bucks thing stings but I bet that old screen was probably built for a different kind of sand or material entirely, like maybe it was for sifting compost or gravel. My neighbor tried using his grandpa's old grain sifter for his kids' play sand and it was a total disaster because the mesh was way too fine and it just gummed up immediately. You might actually be out less money than you think if you count the time you saved not having to clean out that antique screen every 10 minutes versus the new one. Sometimes the real waste is just the hours we spend trying to squeeze life out of stuff that's already lived its life.
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the_john2mo ago
Makes me think of my buddy Dave who spent like three weekends trying to restore an old cast iron wood stove he found at a flea market. He was all excited about the price, maybe 50 bucks, but then the rust was way deeper than he thought and the firebox had a hairline crack he didn't see until he had it all stripped down. Ended up buying a new one for 250 bucks anyway, plus he had like 40 hours of grinding and wire brushing sunk into that old thing. He said the biggest lesson was that sometimes you're just paying for the lesson not to do it again, and that's worth something too. The real cost was all the time he could have been out fishing or hanging with his kids, not wrestling with a stove that was already done.
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