I normally don’t yell in pain about prices and take it as a sign of the times and just something that happens. Part and parcel of enjoying my hobby.
I’m building a new layout and use N.O. pushbuttons for my engine terminal. In the disassembly & move to my new home a few of them got damaged. No big deal! Well, just went looking for them and the price at Radio Suck is $4.40 for 2 of them. Jeeze! My other model railroad mfgr has them for $2.79 each. Used to get 5 on a card at RS for 79¢! HA!
Sorry, but it just came as a big and unwelcome surprise to me. Not really complaining but just a bit caught off guard. After all, a brass steamer at $500 doesn’t phase me but this one blew my thought process! LOL
Agreed… try searching “pbs-110 10pcs” on ebay. Should be able to get 10 or 20 for around 50c apiece, like he said.
I like those buttons because they’re metal and have the threaded shaft. They include nuts and washers for screwing the button onto your control panel. And they come with various fun coloured plastic caps.
I have two 500watt floodlights in the backyard that needed replacing. Home Depot wanted $98.00 for two. I thought about all the stuff I order from China for cheap for the RR and looked up the “made in China” lights that Home Depot sells and sure enough, there they were for $8.00 each, free shipping. I had them in 11 days and they were in the same box and were identical in every way to the ones in Home Depot. Ebay is a wonderful mall.[(-D]
LOL, all the money I save goes to Jason Shron through Rapido trains. I would rather give it to him than Home Depot.[(-D] China gets their $8.00 either way.
Radio Shack was never cheap - it was just convenient when they still had retail stores if you needed somethign and didn;t want to wait a couple of days even for Amazon. Just pop buy and pick it up.
I remember those 79 cent 5 packs of pushbuttons. I had a lot of them. They were the cheapest pushbuttons I ever saw (in terms of quality). Sometimes they worked well, some in the pack you had to really mash down to make contact. The ‘cheap’ potentiometers they sould were also pretty much junk for any serious use - the linear ones had a huge dead band in them. I made a jump port throttle for my Zephyr using a Radio Shack pot and it was next to useless.
When Radio Shack was selling those pushbuttons a 5 for $0.79, you could get the same quality ones from one of the online electronic suppliers at about half that price. Or significantly better ones for a little more money.
What you can’t compare to are the places “specializing in model railroad electronics” - that translates into “we sell the same component for MORE”. Can’t tell you how many times I saw tables at train shows sselling the very same multimeter you can get ar Harbor Freight for $1, or sometimes free, for as much at $17.95!
Miniatronics is convenient, if you have a LHS that stocks their line, and with their LEDs you know exactly which shade of white you are getting, vs taking a gamble that the pack of 100 you order from China on eBay that SAYS “warm white” really are warm white. But that comes at a cost - they are way overpriced for a pack of 5 LEDs. And so are their other items, like toggle switches. You can get them much cheaper from Mouser or Digi-Key or China-based LCSC. The problem is, those palces have hundreds if not thousands of varieties of toggle switches, including ones that are the same ones Miniatronics repackages. The problem there is then finding exactly which item to order out of that huge selection in order to get the same thing. And if you
Try this guy. Even though he’s shutting down the business, he still has some inventory. Even with the shipping, still reasonably priced. I’ve bought all of my push buttons from him…
Someone has to pay for all those orange aprons, and free clinics on how kids and moms can make a house out of 1-by, and those 10-wheel trucks with forks slung on the back. Why not charge what the traffic will bear? That’s not exactly a high-turn item, and it is a relative ‘commodity’ (more so if it conforms to some electrical terminal standard) so it’s ideal as an item to be eased into some e-tailer’s software and logistics support and fulfillment, probably literally for pennies on the dollar.
I first saw what was possible in the shipping policies of a couple of computer retailers, I think by the late '80s, where it was capped at something like $3.99 per order no matter how much you bought. Only some of that was reflected in the retail ‘discount’ prices – much of it was the then-new logistics inherent in being able to load everything to be shipped into a single van or container, to be picked up at a fixed time and delivered to automatic (or at least regimented) sorting and dispatch through a company specializing in transportation and delivery, at a preferential bulk rate that ‘covered costs’ – probably negotiated and periodically re-negotiated hair-raisingly in back rooms somewhere.
I used to say in the '70s ‘Lord help us when the Japanese learn to build Lincolns’. Then I said in the '90s ‘Lord help us when the Japanese learn to build big pickup trucks’. At least one replica locomotive project known to me appears to have been cancelled over the prospect of the Chinese contractors turning out knockoffs and derivatives ‘free’ after the first one … although I have to wonder whose, if any, ox would be gored by such a thing. I have learned not to worry about the Chinese learning to build h
That was my thought when I started my DPDT Toggle Switch thread a few days ago. Since you cannot offer items for sale on this forum, I would encourage forum members who want used DPDT toggle switches cheap to contact me with a PM. Only trouble is, my PM feature no longer works since mid-December. But that’s another story.
I’d postulate they never learned to build Lincolns because they recognized those were dinosaurs and not the way forward. ANd I’ll also wager they haven’t yet quite learned how to build pickups, as mine sits about to collapse any day due to a completely rotted out frame. Multiple frame recalls across multiple model lines to address the issue don’t lend much confidence. Sure, the motor and trnamission will never ever die. But that doesn’t do me much good without a chassis to put it in.
I wonder what sort of lights Batman was getting - I repalced my old 100 watt floodlights that came with the house (4 total in the back yard) with LEDs that are equivalent of 200 watt incandescents - DOUBLE the light, at 1/4 of the power of the old ones (each LED is 25 watts). So now letting the dogs out at night doesn’t make my power meter spin like an airplane propellor.
With China you must think 100 year plan, that is what they think. That is why they never became a real part of the arms race. Most Americans buisness think in 10 year returns, again China thinks 100 and they are more than willing to sacrafice today for 4 generations or more from now instead of our 1 or 2.
I put up 500 and 1000 watt floods so I can see as far as I can throw a ball for the dogs at night, 300’.[(-D] I tried LED floods early on but they did not last, however, if and when these ones need replacing I will go with 1000 watt equivalent LEDS again as I think the quality has improved immensely.
Probably an overheating problem. LEDs are very sensitive to heat. When they get too hot, they permanently dim and then die.
Trouble is, high power LEDs generate a LOT of heat in a very small space. There’s only so much heat you can realistically take away from a light bulb without resorting to complicated and expensive cooling mechanisms. It’s a lot easier to just stick some high powered LEDs, which are very cheap, onto a little tinny bit of metal and sell that. It’ll be really bright, for a little while.
Even worse, for a floodlight, the LED is inside a package which is inside a bulb which is inside a housing of some sort which may be sitting out in the sun on a 100F day. It’s going to get toasty in there.
What’s surprising to me is that some combination of high-heat-transfer mounting and simple heat pipe provides ample cooling for most of these dies. Where a simple close-coupled heat-sunk mass isn['t enough, or active Peltier cooling (plus the above heat-sink mass or capacity) would be too much expense.
Where things get fun is cooling something like a Dubai lamp, where the heat pipe arrangement needs to run up each string and dissipate into something properly insulated from current. Given the level of investment in that project, adding better cooling is almost simple…
I get good mileage out of the halogen ones for the midnight romp to the back 40. They are not on except for those romps or to watch a rare snowfall, so the meter is not smoking for long.[(-D]
I saved the Walthers 50th anniverary catalog and when the 75th anniversay catalog came out, I checked the prices on similar items and found that if you adjust for inflation, like items sell for about the same thing they did before. Locomotives are the one item that are considerably more expensive than a generation ago because DCC and sound have made them significantly more sophisticated. DC locos without sound are a similar price to years past. One thing that caught my eye was that Instant Horizons backgrounds were selling for exactly the same price as 25 years earlier without even adjusting for inflation so effectively they were much cheaper. That has since changed but I found that interesting.
I find inflation to be a big lie, it is supply and demand, same as always. At the start of all this grocery items went up as no bargins were offered, things were going for msrp but the ads are slowly returning now. Train wise the price of decoders has dropped.