Wednesday, August 26, 2015

The poisoned chalice

Today, browsing Craigslist for buts that I might want for my motorhome, I chanced upon this advert.


Well, damn. Just about everything that could go wrong with that motorhome has gone wrong and been fixed! The transmission going just smacks of poor maintainance. Especially at 100,000 miles!

If only this had been available six months ago. What a wonderful source of parts for my current motorhome this would have been! Clearly fixing the transmission would have been not cost-effective or the seller would have done so. I rather suspect the owner traded it in to the garage when he found he'd thrown thousands into an old motorhome only for extra things to break each time. In that respect it was like a secondhand laptop I once owned.

Last century I bought a secondhand laptop. By the time I'd done adding memory, changing the hard drive, loading windows NT4 etc, the graphics card died. At that point I'd spent close to the price of a new laptop and it was only ever going to be old and decrepit. As it was clearly a waste of time doing any more work nor spending more money on such a money pit I stripped it and tried to sell the parts. I had a few interested parties who wanted to pay less than it would have cost to ship the parts to them. I wrote it off as a dead loss and tossed the entire thing on a bonfire.

The guy that owned that motorhome had a miserable experience. The batteries would be of interest but at $600 plus the cost of hiring a vehicle to move it, its way higher than buying the batteries new! Talk about a poisoned chalice!

I'm in the market for batteries. I would have been interested in the generator and fridge but there's no space now.

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