Confessions of a Cheapskate

Without grease, your machinery comes to a grinding halt.  The machinery of bargain hunting requires a special type of grease.  Elbow grease.  Won an eBay auction for some zheaponzipp wheels for your bike (like me) l, great!  Bust out the solvents, the brush, the scotch pads, and get your dirty clothes on.  Time for some elbow grease.

Everybody has a tolerance for what they will withstand regarding crappy jobs.  To be a true bargain hunter, elbow grease is a key lubricant allowing you to turn your bargains (that everyone else passed on) into gold. 

What is your time worth?  Are you high rollin working 60 hour weeks?  Bargain hunting and being a cheapskate probably is not for you.  But, if you are like me, and you like to be done with work int time for the kids hockey practice and then work on shit after they go to bed, well, you got time.  Question is, do you have the elbow grease.  I’ve got it.  Well, sometimes I’ve got it.  If you’ve read my eBay piece from earlier this week, you’ll know that I grabbed some carbon wheels for my bike off fleabay for cheap.  They came with dried out tubular tires glued to the rims.  Remove the tires and you are faced with endless expanses of dried hardened tubular glue.  Oof.  Gonna take some elbow grease.  Round up the brushes, the scraper, the solvents, and get ready to go to town, cause this is gonna take some work.

So, it’s not always the case, but if you are a cheapskate looking for whatever, and you’ve got reserves of elbow grease and time, the number of items available that are a bargain goes up.  But you gotta put in the work.

For me, elbow grease has taken on mostly mechanical or electrical repair skills.  Takes time and understanding.  For cars, I stick to BMWs because I know them.  I can identify common problems and then fix them.  I can do the same with electronics, mainly stereos and amos, cause that’s what I like.  This lets me understand where I can work to drive price down and then get it first or cleaned up and ready for action. 

Elbow grease, do you have it?