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Comment by ElevenLathe | Hacker News Reader

At least in my part of the US (midwest), estate sales are the best place to find old tools. People hold onto them until they die, but then you can buy them! estatesales.net (no affiliation, just a user) lists the vast majority of them, and usually even has pictures of what is for sale that you can scroll through before actually going. I've gotten a lot of insane deals on tools this way -- just recently bought a vintage (good quality, perfect working order) 10inch wood bandsaw for $20!.

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Yep. I'm in the Midwest too. I paid $15 for my chop saw, and it's a lot nicer one than I would have bought new. My table saw cost $6, probably because the plug on the end of the power cord was gone. New plug for $3, and it's fine. Handheld tools like circular saws and drills typically go for $3-5.

I get a dud once in a while, but at those prices, I still end up way ahead overall.

These are so hit and miss - sometimes they’re just everything is incredibly overpriced and sometimes if you show up late, you get an entire garage tools for less than the scrap value of the metal.

Hah. There was an estate sale in my neighborhood last summer. Quite a few tools in the garage that I was interested in but the prices were crazy. 30-50 year-old tools priced the same as brand-new. Even asking 50% off would be been too much for a lot of the stuff. I asked if they would take X for something and the guy said, "we're not doing any discounts, everything is as marked."

Walked back to my car shaking my head. Guess they didn't want to actually sell anything.

I really want to know what happens afterwards. Sometimes it makes sense - a widow trying to clear out her husband's garage without much understanding of what it is - so prices it what she remembers him buying it for.

But others are run by professional estate companies; either they know they can get certain prices online (where?) or they do some form of scam where they overprice everything and when it doesn't sell they offer some "bargain price" to clear the house out.

The last day of most estate sales is when heavy discounts are available.

^this. Typically there is even a standard where, for example, on a Thu-Sun sale, Thursday and Friday things will be priced as marked, Saturday will be half the marked price, and Sunday will be 1/4 the marked price. It's essentially a form of price discrimination: if you want the thing badly enough, you'll come earlier and pay more. If you're willing to chance it, you can maybe get 75% off by rolling in on Sunday.

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