It also used to cost proportionally more of your disposable income; You'd probably be more inclined to borrow an item if it would cost the next month's cash to acquire.
This is exactly it. The drill in question is the kind of thing you find on special at Home Depot for $30. Likewise for (just riffing on the stuff I see in the photos in the linked article) the therma-rests and tents for camping, or the collection of board games[1], etc...
Basically, the causality in the grandparent's analysis is wrong. We aren't refusing to borrow stuff from our neighbors because we're unable due to some modern affliction, we don't bother because someone gave us that drill for father's day last year. The junk is the cause, not the effect.
[1] Which is hardly a new phenomenon. The home I grew up in 40 years ago was drowning in these things too.
Does the US have tool renting places for contractors? The ones here have all sorts of tools, including massive stuff (e.g. Excavators, trench cutting equipment, graders). They aren't particularly cheap to use, but they have what is needed. Excessively dirty or broken tools get refunded too.
Yes, both the US and Canada have tool/equipment rental places that are used by both contractors and homeowners for this sort of thing. They're usually focused on the bigger ticket items, but often have smaller speciality items too.
The thing that interests me about the maker spaces is that they provide a _place_ for this activity where the equipment is already set up, and a community of people that are interested in sharing their skills. You don't really find that at the commercial tool rental places.
I still wouldn't buy a drill today, but I'd consider renting one from Home Depot before asking neighbors (mostly because the idea of asking neighbors wouldn't cross my mind, to prove GP's point).
A drill/electric screwdriver is probably the most useful power tool today for a home owner. If you don't own one you likely wouldn't own any power tools. And at a car ride and $20 a day rental it doesn't take long to justify the on sale price. Are you space constrained or do you just not do simple maintenance yourself or is there some other reason my engineer brain isn't grokking.
Eg I wouldn't even work on a light switch without a power drill because I don't want to make the literal 200 revolution over 5 minutes per screw to check if it's out. Also it's harder to shock yourself.
And to be fair I own not just a drill but woodworking tools and metal working tools (lathe mill) and a 3d printer and cover a laser cutter and a welder that does aluminum. So maybe I'm biased.
"Eg I wouldn't even work on a light switch without a power drill because I don't want to make the literal 200 revolution over 5 minutes per screw"
200 revolutions, 5 minutes? What kind of screws are in your light switch?
I've never seen one that took a sizeable number revolutions.
A quick check suggests 6-32 threading is standard. That means 32 threads-per-inch, so your 200 revolutions means your light switch screws are six inches long??
Mild exaggeration. They're usually 2 inches from what I recall. If you're doing a lot of light switches or even a few it's still a lot of turns with your hand, or you know 2-3 seconds with a drill. But for 2 gang box, that's 4 2" screws + 4 decorative screws. So 5 minutes is not really an exaggeration to take all that out, about the same to put it all back in. And when you take into consideration how it's better to just shove a ton of wires into the box (as contractors do) instead of leaving the wires too short, the mechanical advantage of the drill doing the work allowing you to align the screw with minimal and accurate force instead of doing accurate alignment while cranking hard with a screwdriver... yes it's a big win.
And then you get to flat head decorative screws, I find it way easier to use a drill on those as it is easier to not scratch the paint off of the screws, which bothers me.
Good to know. Never thought of that. Tho my loft had super deeply recessed boxes that fell back without the screws so you needed super long ones to tension the box to the drywall.
Poster was mildly exaggerating. Poster also prefers to get all the honey do sh*t done in one go instead of stopping because hand is tired. Honey do things encounter enough issues and trips to home depot that I'm not keen on adding 2 more (to pick up the drill and drop it off).
Poster was me, and I wouldn't do that. Besides 1/2 the time impact drivers won't even fit in those gaps. You gotta slip the thing in there and curse the engineer who designed it along with every other person servicing the thing ever.
One statistic I've seen is that a drill has on average about 10 minutes of use. So for a lot of people who own one it makes no sense at all. I for one simply borrow the hammer drill at work when I need it; at home I have a cordless screwdriver which takes care of screws and most holes that don't go into concrete or bricks.
Cordless screwdriver isn't far off from a drill, I would consider both for a homeowner.
Hammer drill is getting into more interesting things, I own one but I would definitely lend it out to a friend (with maybe some supervision the first time). I got mine at a steal like 25 years ago. But most people need to go through wood, plastic, or drywall, not concrete.
Also my drill has seen several hours of runtime but I also redid my loft apartment, and am generally handy.
Hammer drill is what I meant with drill, as the cordless screwdriver suffices for most other things. In Europe you need it pretty much in every home as walls are brick and concrete. Wood, plastic, or drywall are rather uncommon construction materials for walls here.
This also means that drilling a hole in ten seconds doesn't work often.
This doesn't seem that surprising given that a hole takes ~10 seconds to drill... ie. if you have 10 projects over the course of a few years that need a handful of holes each, it's probably still worth it to buy a drill, unless borrowing one happens to be very convenient...
Lots of people buy stuff like a drill, use it once, and never use it again for years. They can do it because equipment like this is dirt cheap; it's worth the cost of the item to solve the initial problem; it's a bonus if it ever gets used again.
Yeah. That's really a bad example. If you ever do just about any amount of housework a good cordless drill and the associated bits are the one piece of power tool gear you'll pull out on a regular basis. I have various things out in my workshop I use rarely but the drill (and my Dremel) are in my closet and get pulled out all the time.
I remember my parents lending their caravan to friends in the seventies, they would lend and borrow tools as well. The reason I remember is they were constantly complaining about the state things were returned in, breakages were frequent.
I have a random alternate data point. There are a ton of craftsman metal lathes out there from the 20s to 60s. I think more people had way more workshop capabilities. But anecdotally I notice that people prefer to either do metal stuff or wood stuff. They take the same type of tools but don't really cross over (wood lathe really doesn't work on metal and vice versa). Enough so that most people can't afford both, in terms of space or money. Also hot metal chips cause sawdust to go up in flames, sawdust gets all up in your metal cutting oils and coolant, so you have to keep a cleaner shop than usual.
As for renting stuff, rental gear is usually beat to shit by people who a) don't know what they're doing, b) are too cheap to pay for the real tool, so they'll use a small sander (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006EKFZQ4/ref=asc_df_B006EKFZQ450...) rental to resurface their floor when they need a full size one to really do a house (https://www.amazon.com/Clarke-Drum-Sander-Ez-8-Expandable/dp...) [had a friend do this, but he just under rented and went right back an hour later], or use a drill as a saw, c) or just don't give a shit about the equipment and beat the crap out of it anyway... eg moral hazard. I've rented tools where it looked like it was fine and immediately broke (person glued the pull starter onto the engine when string broke). I then had to spend an hour discussing with the rental place if I broke it. Another time they forgot a part and tried to charge me for it then 20 minutes later found it on the floor. They're generally a good store but it's a shitty market.
In my neighborhood in France we keep lending/borrowing each other stuff all the time. It probably helps that most of the resident are eldery people who accumulated a bunch of useful stuff.
But even a $10 tool I won't led out. No, you're not borrowing my 15mm spanner because I'll never get it back.
That could be less of a problem when you're borrowing it from an actual service like the one in the article.
Yeah, that's basically it: I won't borrow or lend out from individuals, but when there's a contract in place (supported by a membership fee in this case) that defines the limits of liability and cost of replacement then it's not borrowing anyway. It is, as someone else mentioned, hiring.
People hire cars all the time. If you break it you are put out. Same usually with rental equipment. Or you pay the "insurance" on it, which no one does.
indeed, outside of luxury items, things have become very cheap. real estate, health care, and education have become very expensive. As an aside, one can pin the persistence of ZIRP on the Fed measuring the wrong things.
The alternative explanation for those items is that items whose price is subsidized and/or not fully disclosed to the consumer tend to rise. The graph shows everything dropping in price except:
- shelter (slight rise - real estate is tax advantaged and routinely debt-financed over decades)
- medical care (significant rise, and insurance and tax shelter of insurance and government programs hide the full cost)
- college (very heavily subsidized, by government, schools, and parents)
The other items the article mentions (summer camps, veterinary care, and broadway shows) are all luxury goods. At least if you're not a farmer/rancher for a living.
Yes, the thesis that services become relatively more expensive is interesting, but the effect of subsidies and hidden prices is well understood already.
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