{"id":50,"date":"2004-06-02T20:51:48","date_gmt":"2004-06-03T03:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/?p=50"},"modified":"2010-05-28T02:12:11","modified_gmt":"2010-05-28T09:12:11","slug":"pitchin-a-grizzly-tent-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/2004\/06\/pitchin-a-grizzly-tent-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Pitchin’ a Grizzly tent, part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Part II is here<\/a>)
\nA couple of weeks ago a friend<\/a> and I decided to check out the Grizzly tent sale<\/a>. We live in the Redmond, about an hour and a half south of Grizzly’s HQ, so this was a bit of an undertaking. We took Scott’s wife’s pickup and plotted our plan of attack in the car. Scott was shopping for a studly new 8″ jointer<\/A>, so I brought catalogs from Sunhill<\/a> and others for price comparison. I didn’t have anything on my must-buy list, although I’m keeping an eye open for a bargain to replace my old Grizzly tablesaw.
\nA moment’s intermission: for those unaware, Grizzly is low-price tool importer. They’re one of the best importing Chinese machinery; they usually use american-made motors, and have their own engineers do quality-assurance. While the quality isn’t quite what you’ll find from an American-made tool, it’s not bad and a heck of a lot cheaper.
\nSo the tent sale is their chance to unload the planer that rusted on the way from Shanghai, the tablesaw that has minor bloodstains from the troublesome Safety-Shield demo, and everything else that can’t be sold through normal channels. The good news is that the prices are crazy-low. The bad news is that there’s a lot of junk to sort through, and most of the good stuff goes in the first 15 minutes.
\nYes, you heard me right. Brave souls line up at 8 in the morning, even camping out the night before, and charge in first thing in a fit of scavenging fury. They burst forth with literally tons of machinery, and the checkout\/loading line can take an hour or more.
\nWe got there at 10:00, inadvertently discovering a neat trick. If someone tears off the tag from a machine but doesn’t pay for it, after two hours, it gets re-tagged and you can buy it again. So while we missed the first round of deals, we did get first crack at all the re-tagged merchandise. As a rule of thumb, if you can’t be there at 8:00, be there at 10:00 (or 3:00 when they’ll haggle over what’s left).
\nMore on the trip coming shortly…<\/p>\n


\n(Unfortunately, it’s tough to know if a given tool is really American-made. For example, Delta and Jet both import some of their tools. Some of the very high-end guys like (I belive) Oliver don’t, but then again, their smallest jointer is 10″! Not exactly in the casual woodworker’s price range.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weeks ago a friend and I decided to check out the Grizzly tent sale. We live in the Redmond, about an hour and a half south of Grizzly’s HQ, so this was a bit of an undertaking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-woodworking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danshapiro.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}