It was one of those rare days when things went better than expected, the lads with the surface grinder couldn't get their jack under the base of the grinder and i'd made a foot for my high lift jack to do this and had some metal wedges to get it in. anyway, it worked and we got them out of the shit and helped ourselves as well. as we were leaving i stopped at the gate of the unit to ring mrs seal to tell her we were loaded and on the way back, and i mentioned that for all the many tools i'd taken with me to do the job the only thing i actually used was the jack, and at this point i remembered we'd left it behind. which was lucky in itself as without just jogging my memory by mentioning it, i'd have lost the jack, the wedges and the sledge hammer. even luckier though as the other opportunity we'd have had to realise we'd left the jack behind was when we had a puncture on the land rover half way home.
Great looking drill, hard to imagine so few bidders on it. Bet you looked in the mirror a few times winding round the corners on the way home with that towering above you in the trailer.! Well Wear!! Wonder did the Mill sitting in the corner make big money, also looked like a Colchester Triumph lathe in there too?
There was a Triumph, i think it was an 1800, and a roundhead student lathe, tidy well used examples, all the tools were old but well looked after. i did ask how much they made and the guy was about to tell me but we got side tracked, he did say they made very strong money though.
I think many of the machines went for export as they were older, but this was just a bit too old and perhaps there's no export on it, i suspect other bidders might have been put off by the prospect of moving it, i admit i was a bit stressed about it, even though in the end i needn't have been, just hope the unloading goes as well as the loading.
I was talking to the lady who owned it and it turned out the machine shop had been run be her husband who had died of covid, he was only 70, it was a fair place, looked like a real old school engineering firm, such a shame to see it end like that. In line with what we were saying about tools outliving their owners, she said she was glad that most of the machines were going to be used again by people who would appreciate them