Agree on the see and touch before buying attitude.
With the growing cost of postage perhaps people will start to appreciate local outlets more but those businesses must get themselves a good online presence too that then clearly shows their location and the advantage of collecting in person. That means advertise postage included prices if you like but don't rip off the customer when they turn up at the shop.

A big problem I have with online possible shopping (especially but not exclusively non modelling needs) is the lack of information that is provided. There may be a dozen suppliers but they all show the same photos and manufacturers basic spec. A big opportunity is lost to use the low cost of using the internet to provide lots of details.

The days of the local tool merchant are pretty much behind us. I think a good relationship can be made with online suppliers, both from item quality and the service given i.e. speed of delivery and a reasonable returns policy. I think some of the disappointment with online purchases comes from hunting down the cheapest price rather than the best combination of quality and price. I have my preferred online suppliers and am rarely disappointed. For some items I stick to reliable brands but pay a premium for this choice, an illustration of this is I buy Dormer drills which I doubt anyone would be disappointed with the performance of but the price is a bit steep.this maybe be an example where looking and feeling may not be helpful as a drill can look the part but not perform. I feel that some online dealers do their best to supply items that are fit for purpose and not just cheap and offer their backing to what they sell. I suspect that with so much of what we buy being imported with no brand or recognisable name to rely on we are in the hands of the dealer and his good name. Already some of the suppliers are building positive reputations and being confident to put their names on their products. I think some of the old established brands are playing a dangerous game by putting their name on items made abroad which as long as the quality they built their reputations with is still there it's OK but I feel that sometimes it is not.

Mike

Jesse. I too had an old A10 and a nice bike but slow. I also remember when the Japanese bikes started to take over and I sold the BSA for a Yamaha. then I got a BMW flat twin. a great bike that BMW. However I am not a lover of the products of the far east. Its mainly rubbish they turn out, looks ok for a time and then just starts to fall apart. I don't think its so much a cost issue here in the UK. Its mainly very poor management, lack of R&D and unfair taxes that is killing industry in the UK. Some years back I helped to build MRI scanners. the company had around 100 small local engineering companies who supplied on demand. to try to make more margin the powers that be ordered from the far east. there was a 3 month lead time. In that 3 months the local mainly one man bands started to close down. when the parts turned up from china, well to say that they were bad and not fit for purpose was an understatement. production closed as the supplied chain had gone. 1000 people lost their jobs. I have know time for far eastern rubbish and never will have. The fact that I am using tooling from the 1960,s shows that it was made to last and I am sure it will out last me. I don't think anyone can say that about imported tools from the far east. michael

20 years ago I could not do what I do now, the internet has changed everything. We are a 15 mile round trip to any sort of shop, 60 mile round for any sort of tooling or fasteners. We don't all live in big cities.

It's silly to say that all Far Eastern stuff is crap. That includes China but of course most electronics, computers, phones, cameras etc these days are made there and many such products are better than anything we ever made here. There's some real crap of course – and everything in between. And of course, the Japanese and Koreans churn out some really rather fine products. That includes surely the best machine tools you can buy.

Manufacturing in the UK is still alive and kicking, despite the best efforts of generations of abysmal managers, financiers and rabid politicians.Mercifully a lot of the worst companies have stopped tormenting us now by going bust finally (Rover etc) but there is work to do. The last thing we'd want is to return to the bad old days. Although the machine tools have lasted, thankfully a lot of other stuff has gone by the wayside.

Murray

I must be lucky. Near where I live is the small city of Albury.

There is a lovely tool supplier there, who stocks quality kit. Off the shelf Sutton, Dormer and Frost cutters, P&N taps and dies. I found a bottle of layout fluid on the shelves and a tube of engineers blue. Nothing like that in the giant hardware chain up the road.

Maybe not as cheap as some of cheaper imports, but I would rather buy once and pay a little more.

One other bonus is that the people there know their stuff and so the advice on how to use the kit is priceless.

* Danny M *

In the UK the problem disappearing shops does not only apply to Tools stores, but right across the spectrum, hence our disappearing High Street shops. It simply comes down to fact that independant traders cannot compete with the big boys any longer because the majority of the buying public go for the cheapest irrespective of quality.

It is often stated on these forums that Far East machinery is rubbish and British is best, however British manufacturers have gone bust because we did not want to pay the prices they were asking.

I bought my Myford Speed 10 new in the early 1980s and with all the various bits and pieces it cost me something like £1200. Taking inflation in account today that would be £3-4000 if not more. There is no way that today I would pay £3000+ for a Speed 10. Nowadays we want more and we want to pay less to what we were prepared pay years ago.

Regards Luigi

Having earned a good living from the Cowley car plant for the last 43 years I shall leap to the defence of the british car industry. In 1972 Cowley employed 28,000 people to produce around 300,000 cars a year we now have about 4,500 people and 1,100 robots to produce about the same number of cars. Many brands have been built at Cowley which was originally a Morris plant. Since I have worked there we have built Austin, Morris, Triumph, Rover, Hillman, MG and even Rolls Royce body shells. Much innovative design and engineering came from the companies that formed the ill fated British Leyland conglomerate. Huge strides were made in bringing the company up to date with the best manufacturing methods but as fast as we moved the goalposts also moved. Investors were reluctant to put their money into factories with the appalling industrial relations record of the 60/70s by the 80s the bad old days were behind us but the memories were still strong. The MINI that we started building in 2001 with the backing of BMW shows that with proper investment and a well designed and engineered product brings success. Lord Nuffield is widley revered as a philanthropist but maybe if more of the money had been reinvested in the products Cowley could have kept up with the Japanese invasion. BMW just didn't have deep enough pockets to save the english patient and chose to keep Cowley and make it a success. Jaguar Landrover are building some very desirable cars with the most up to date manufacturing methods and some very heavy investment from their new owners. John Bloor has shown that with the right vision and investment a successful Uk built motorcycle can be built, wisely the only bit of the old brand he kept was the name, TRIUMPH Is a great brand name on some great motorcycles.

Mike

Edited By Michael Poole on 23/01/2015 23:11:20

Muzzer sums its up. Everyone of us, bar none (unless there is a mini silicon valley hidden away in the UK somewhere) is now staring at a device that is made in the Far East and most refer to far east as being west of Japan through to west India A glance around the room will lump the majority of items into the same category as well…cell phones, TV, stereo, etc.

No doubt there is some excellent quality gear from this broadly defined region..I have a Korean lathe which the better half claims I love more than her! There's also plenty of rubbish as well and we sometimes have a task picking out the better items. The mill drill is also an eastern variety. It has some limitations and not the quality of the lathe but which home hobbyist can trot out and buy a new Cincinnati just to mill up a few hornblocks and a few cylinders.

Times have changed. I agree with Jesse, the memories of the trip to town and visiting the various stores with goodies abound while Mum headed off to the department stores are priceless. But the cost of postage charged by online sellers would not even cover the cost of fuel and with time so precious, we can comfortably beaver away at our projects and complete the never ending domestic chores knowing that bag of BA nuts is on its way. Without opening a can of worms, the changing times and the increasingly limited availability of BA sizes is an area of consternation as I've yet to find good quality small size metric threadforms that adequately replace BA. (Methinks I might get shot down here!) I note that a UK supplier is claiming an ideal substitute with excellent quality and scale hex sizes source from Germany, I've just purchased (online!) some of the sizes so looking forward to using them.

Finally something to consider and some personal observations. China might be cheap but they have a single mission and that is to increase GDP, improve the quality of living and address their environmental woes with air and water quality. (which is part of the reason I spend a chunk of working time here) The result of all this is that cost of production is heading upwards. Just live in any major city on the coastal side and you will easily pay western prices for apartments, cars (if you are lucky enough to draw the ballot), food and entertainment. I'm not saying this will give rise to opportunities for the machine tool industry in the west but things will begin level out in the not too distant future.

Maybe things improved then Jesse but they certainly needed to..

I regularly visited a large BL plant near Spaghetti Junction in the '70s (to do plant maintenance work). It was a real pain in the backside to go there for a number of reasons and I was delighted when some other poor s** took over the work and I was moved elsewhere..

Although I had previously owned a new Triumph Dolomite (which I enjoyed driving) I was never tempted to buy another BL car after seeing inside one of their factories.

IanT