Expensive Hobbies

[vetran]

some people get more fun out of doing their hobby for the least possible. MS will tell you my bike is > 20 years old but its not the bike that isn't good enough.

I spend money on decent electric drills though.

[mudskipper]

some people get more fun out of doing their hobby for the least possible. MS will tell you my bike is > 20 years old but its not the bike that isn't good enough.

I spend money on decent electric drills though.

Your bike is older than your cycling buddy!

[vetran]

Your bike is older than your cycling buddy!

yes, its embarrassing, we were out a fortnight ago and rode past a restaurant I went to with my wife when courting and started waxing lyrical about it, then realised I had last been there before she had been born. My don't the policemen look young

[vetran]

It's not so much the drills as the batteries that are crap.

my Makita drill batteries lasted 6 years. The B&D ones about a year.

[SimonMac]

My hobby is photography, I was asked to cover a charity fishing match and the organiser was at pains to say that the poles used cost several hundred pounds, some even in the thousands so I spent the morning carefully avoiding their equipment and great personal risk to me and mine, over lunch someone asked me about my kit and I told them the body, glass and other accessories etc ran into several thousand pounds.

The rest of the day I didn't really care about their equipment as much as I did for mine

[doodab]

The batteries in my original B&D screwdriver did 10 years (with a bit of encouragement).

The batteries in "Challenge" drills are lucky to still work when you take them home from Argos.

The batteries in a Halfords 18V drill seem to have lasted a fair time, but one pack died the other month, fails to charge or do anything much apart from get hot.

Ho hum.

What chemistries are they? I've found NiMH to be fairly useless, except the low self discharge ones. Lithium seem to give more power but they do age quite quickly.

Also, I suspect a lot of stuff lacks a proper low voltage cut off which results in some of the cells discharging too much which basically kills them. I've found when using NiMH cells in kids toys for example that I often have to trickle charge one or two of the flat cells in an ancient charger before my hi-tech one will even recognise them, and nearly all the cheapo cells I bought from maplin ended up in the bin due to overdischarging.

[Zippy]

I need adrenaline and that's expensive.

[doodab]

I buy the Lidl(tm) cells these days since I won't use maplin any more, they being perveyors of crap.

I might try some of those next time ms doobab goes to Lidl. I normally buy Ansmann, Panasonic or Sanyo branded low self discharge ones

[OwlHoot]

Aside from millionaire's toys such as private jets and fast cars, I always assumed the most expensive hobbies were horses and boats.

Oh and women

[SimonMac]

I need heroin and that's expensive.

FTFY