What's your average day like?

[jere]

My day changes depending on the weather and what I can find to pay the bills. I drive a taxi on some days but that is just a step above gambling with scratch off tickets to pay the bills. To save money I fix everything on my own from anything in the house we rent or on the car. I wake up in mid day check craigslist for free stuff or tools that can be repurposed, cleaned up and resold or reused. Right now its been around 0* F out in the garage so I can only work on projects for a couple hours. So I try to spend some time with my daughter in warm up breaks. Today I am bringing a 1934 factory singer sewing machine inside to do some repairs. Then walk down to the cab office and lease a cab until 4 am or so and walk back home.

[Jon]

I hear ya on the unheated garage jere. I'm thinking of putting a cheapo Craigslist woodburner in mine. We actually get some really nice 60 degree days in the middle of winter in Colorado, but there have also been times when it's 20 below, and I'm pouring boiling water from a teakettle onto the tile saw between cuts.

Do you use any of the Craigslist search or notification tools like SearchTempest? Any other tricks, like searching for misspellings?

[DIYer]

What kind of kit car? I have been scrounging up tools for a while now to eventually try a midlana.

Haven't heard of a Midlana before, but as Ken says that it's a Lotus 7 replica, is should be a great driver's car.

[jere]

I hear ya on the unheated garage jere. I'm thinking of putting a cheapo Craigslist woodburner in mine. We actually get some really nice 60 degree days in the middle of winter in Colorado, but there have also been times when it's 20 below, and I'm pouring boiling water from a teakettle onto the tile saw between cuts.

Do you use any of the Craigslist search or notification tools like SearchTempest? Any other tricks, like searching for misspellings?

Having to use boiling water for the tile saw is pretty cold situation but very resourceful. There was a school house wood boiler from the 1940s, that was refrigerator sized in the garage when we moved in. It ate wood like crazy but didn't put out much heat. Make sure to find one with a long skinny horizontal exhaust pipe if you go that route.

I like the meta search tools for more expensive harder to find items, but don't use them too often. Here in Akron there are a lot of old houses ,closed down factories, and old families. So there there is a lot of good old stuff mixed in with new imported low grade tools. The best finds come from shops or moving sales had someone in the family or an owner that grew up in the great depression. People from that era are a lot like people on a hoarder TV show. They will have a 2 car garage full of industrial shop tools, so packed that you can't walk through. Those folks just want their old tools out of the way so they can park a car or fathers tools gone so they don't need packed up to a move.

To pick these sales out I mostly just try to be the first to respond to the ad. They are the ads that usually have the worst photos or no photos and are really vague in the description. Often there will be some stuff hiding in the background of photos. Or they might have a few bad ads with hard to see rusty somethings in the antiques, farm, commercial sections rather than tools.

[jere]

Haven't heard of a Midlana before, but as Ken says that it's a Lotus 7 replica, is should be a great driver's car.

It s kind of a cross between an Ariel atom and a lotus 7. The designer wrote a book called kimini that really got me on board.
www.midlana.com is the authors second project and he covers a ton of good builders information if you want to find it more.