Good Grief !

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=32251639463

MichaelG.

It’s going to be really out of date now but if you really need to read it a Google search shows it’s available as an E book or a copy can be borrowed from various libraries.

Tony

On 3 September 2025 at 09:16 noel shelley Said:

I’m not surprised ! A while back I was checking the availability or otherwise of some of the books I have and their value – quite ordinary books/titles and the astounding prices that were being quoted ! On the figures quoted I’m a wealthy man – but I’m in no way convinced that if I tried to sell them they would realised the figures the dealers are trying to sell at.  Noel

Two legitimate reasons for wildly high prices:

• Adding adverts is expensive, so it’s cheaper to signal ‘not available’ by putting a massive price on items to temporarily put customers off.  The price is reduced to normal when stock is available.
• It’s the cost of a book search service – paying real people to hunt for books in backstreet bookshops, car boot sales, auctions, house clearance, and street markets etc.  Mostly used by rare-book collectors, and very expensive.

Dave

I am usually quite good at finding PDFs of books but this one is evading me entirely.

AFAIK it was written at a time of where both HSS was used primarly but carbides were coming in too, and the information is still very very useful.

Im sure ill get one eventually.

Cheers

I read something about HSS cutting tools in a book published many years ago. If memory serves the total number of tools needed for lathe work in a production environment was 127. There were many shapes for different operations plus slightly different angle grinds for a variety of materials. If you only worked in say steel or aluminium alloy you may get away with only about 40 different tools! 😂

On 3 September 2025 at 14:25 cogdobbler Said:

Many booksellers use pricing software that often loses touch with reality. OThers use buying software and inflated prices result from bot bidding wars, which is then picked up by the pricing software , and so the vicious circle goes on.

… 

Really?  Can you name one!  I can’t think of a reason why anyone would employ a bot that inflated the price of books like “Design and Use of Cutting Tools”.

A bot might collate auction prices, but their records are unreliable.   One problem is they show the last bid, but not that the sale was actually completed at that price.   So the published price is wrong if someone accidentally bids £1000 rather than £10.00 and cancels, or the item is returned, or lost in transit.

Stock exchange speculators have software that makes money by predicting price movements, so as to buy and sell before the other guy wakes up.  As predicting is always dodgy, software has been known to get into bidding wars, and to sell prematurely.   Software behaves just like a human dealer except it’s much faster, never sleeps, and isn’t emotional!

So far, software hasn’t done as much damage as humans.  Consider Nick Leeson.  Unsupervised with minimum bureaucracy, in 1995 he broke Barings Bank by doubling up on poorly chosen futures, eventually blowing £830M before his dozy bosses woke up to their losses.  Credit Lyonnais lost even more money in the same year for similar reasons – human incompetence and fraud.  And many more examples in more recent times.   Hence organisations being keen to replace unreliable people with machines that do what they’re told, and can be reprogrammed when an error is found.

Stuff is only worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it.  Asking too much leaves sellers stuck with stock, which is usually bad.  Overstocking being costly, software and people both try to avoid it, thus prices tend average towards a normal value. But note there is always a difference between buying and selling price – driving a new car off the forecourt typically wipes a few thousand off it’s value.

Unfortunately,  this being a very imperfect world, wonderful stuff sometimes goes for a song, and sometimes people pay far too much for rubbish!  It has always been thus. Caveat emptor.

Dave

On 11 September 2025 at 11:54 SillyOldDuffer Said:

I can’t think of a reason why anyone would employ a bot that inflated the price of books like “Design and Use of Cutting Tools”.

I can: Because it doesn’t really matter. These are outliers that probably won’t generate much revenue either way, so if the bots screw up once in a while it can be more costly to fix it. Don’t forget this prolly isn’t one bot misbehaving on it’s own but the interaction between seller and buyer bots.