Yesterday while out and about shopping ammo. The Scrap yard I use called and told me they had some stuff with my mark on it. Pretty much everything that got stolen out of the shop one day while I was gone was sitting there in boxes and crates and there stood my old sawmill head totally intact beside the other stuff. I never expected to see any of that stuff again. The big thing was the mill head but the dozen Estwing Hammers and the 3/4" drive set with all of the sockets and various ratchets, breaker bars and extensions and my very high end floor jack were no small things. I had the thieves on video stealing the stuff including a clear shot of the truck license plate. As usual the County Sheriff took a report and did NOTHING. The Scrap Yard is in a different County and they snap the picture of every license plate on the scale and the driver and get a copy of their drivers license. I engrave all of my expensive stuff with my 3 initials and have my mark on file at all of the scrap yards and pawn shops in the area. The Sheriff and Deputy were at the scrap yard when I arrive and knew exactly who the thieves were and where they live. I believe he called them frequent flyers in the criminal justice system. So I filled out some paperwork, they took pictures and lifted finger prints everything with my mark and got the report I filled out on the theft from my home county. I paid the scrap yard what they paid for my stuff and a little more as a thank you and they loaded it all on my truck. On the way home the phone buzzed and it was the States Attorney for that County telling me the thieves were in Custody and wanted confirm that I wanted to press charges. And asked for a copy of the video of them stealing my stuff. The Scrap price they got for my stuff was $170 and I gave them $200 for it. I could have gone through the process of getting it back for nothing or I could just pay what they paid for it and drive off with it then. I do a lot of business with that scrap yard and just went the most amicable route. I may or may not get my $200 back through the legal system, these guys are a couple of meth freaks that don't have a pot to piss in so not likely to recover the money. LOL I guess now that they are in custody my home County is all about prosecuting them for the initial theft. I told the Sheriff I was surprised they were not holding all of my stuff for evidence and he was like Yeah like I have any place to store a truck load of evidence! The Pictures, video and finger prints will do just fine. My 3/4" Impact set is $3500 to replace The standard sockets, ratchets, bars and extensions are $5000 to replace. I don't buy cheap tools for my shop and Snap On tools ain't cheap. I don't just leave them laying out either the Thieves used a cordless angle grinder to cut the lock off of the shop doors and again to cut the lock off of the tool cage inside the shop. It was a 12 hour day away for cancer stuff so they had plenty of time to shop my machine shed. LOL over 2 hours of footage of them loading stuff onto their truck and cutting the locks off. I have the mill head back and am going to keep it at this point. I am going to refurbish it and put it back into service. The New mill from Hud-Son is a cheaply made piece of junk and I strongly advise anyone getting a sawmill just scratch Hud-Son of the list. The new mill has been nothing but one thing breaking after another and I am constantly having to weld and put self tapping screws into it to hold it together and we shall not speak of the junk bargain bin engine they put on it. Nothing like happily milling a long and the grade 2 bolts they put in to hold the engine, flywheels and band up break and drop the whole side down to the concrete in the middle of a log and ruins a expensive band. Or the cheap junk rubber band on the drive flywheel melting or both flywheel bearing burning up in less than 50 hours. Or the clutch frying in less than 75 hours. I can have the old mill engine rebuilt, new rubber on the flywheels and the bearings with 1000 hours on them replaced all in about 14 hours. On paper and the sales propaganda the new mill looks better than the old mill by miles. In practice Hud-Son is cranking out steaming pile of.......... Now days. It is 1/4 the mill that the old mill is and I really would have gotten a better mill buying central electric mill from harbor freight. The old mill was just as good as a comparable Woodmizer. I should have spent a few thousand more and bought a new comparable Woodmizer! As it is I am going to have to pull the new head off the tracks and put it in the shop and put the bargain bin engine in the scrap metal pile and pull one of the Kohler Command pro 24hp engines out of the storage container and put it on. Do a lot of grinding off cheap soft metal on the frame and weld on new harder and heavier gauge metal and basically rebuilt the entire new head from the ground up in order for it to be dependable and functional. Just a near total waste of $11,000. One should not have to rebuild a new mill from the ground up that has less than 100 running hours on it! Hud-Sons excuses "We can't get good engines" "We can't get quality steel." "The Ongoing supply chain issues" " we can't get competent labor for the assembly line." The last I can understand and sympathize with Funny at this point I have no trouble finding quality engines and steel............ The reality is they greatly raised the price of the mills and are using the cheapest shit they can to build them. I used to sing the praises of the Hudson sawmills........ Not anymore after fighting with the new piece of junk.
Good that you got your stuff back....you should put some of your bad Santa pix on your storage shed exterior....just to let potential thieves know that they might just get more than a lump of coal from you.
Well ,, they say everything happens for a reason. I don't always believe that ,, but sometimes comes true . Been wondering about your milling projects ,,, I guess now we know ,, you can't do milling videos , if ya have to keep fixin' the mill . Hopefully with everything you got now,, it'll keep you running for a while. I wonder why it took them so long to scrap it out ,, them old meth heads usually dump stuff as fast as they can . Congratulations either way.
And why scrap high dollar tools instead of pawning or selling on craigslist or marketplace etc??? Scrap price while high is not how I would have disposed of the stuff. Knowing names allowed me to find addy and addy allowed me to peek at their place with google earth. Looks like they are accumulators. They are also only 6 miles NW of me just on the other side of the County Line.
They probably thought it was safer to get rid of the stuff at the scrapyard. That's the only thing that makes any sense to me but who knows what a Meth Head thinks.
Lucky. My tools theft 15 years ago cost me 10k. The only thing I ever got back was a pressure washer from a pawn shop. I found the Kayak the took in a guys yard, knocked on the door and asked him about it. He bought it from the guy that pawned the pressure washer for his son, and I told him to just keep it. I was tired of it anyway, but would have loved to get my tools back. The scum-sucker that took my stuff went home to West Virginia and was never prosecuted.
Losing tools that you need is a rough one! I don't need the big drive and impact sets often but when I do I NEED THEM. I am not hurting for money but I am not rich either and replacing everything lost that day would have hurt bad. I was replacing things as the need for them arose. Can get by with cheap tools but there is a lot to be said for high quality tools.
Had a work van back in the early 2000s ,, I was in Home Depot one evening,, crooks busted a back window out and stole all kinds of stuff,, I figured about 5000 bucks worth. I couldn't get anyone in the store to give a shit , asking if they had cameras ,, cops didn't give a shit ,, it took weeks before I realized what all they did take . You don't know it's missing till you need it . I had a Pit bull at the time , she had separation anxiety real bad ,, so she went to work with me most days ,,, I'm thankful I didn't have her with me that day ,, they'd have stolen her to ,, she was just a big lap dog.
Kinda like that bush hog you got at Rural King! When are you going to learn to stop buying new stuff and simply rebuild old stuff?
Meth heads don't care. I read about a guy that tried to hold-up a police station...because he needed a fix and wasn't thinking. Hell, he was most likely brain dead!
Thieves are usually people that live near you and may have heard about your wife's health problems through the grapevine...it's only 6 miles. Also, social media makes it so much easier for thieves to monitor when you will be away from home for a variety of reasons...work, health problems, vacation, funerals, etc.! Hope that the police have checked out all of that junk to see if anything is stolen. Looks like they have plenty of scrap metal to sell, why did they steal yours?
I'm so glad that you got your tools back! There are lots of thieves and a chop shop on almost every road here, but it's very easy to find people on an island.
I got the King Klutter because no one else had a rotary mower and RK Had exactly 1 out the 7 stores in a 60 mile radius. As far as rebuilding Old stuff I have 1940s stuff still working but there comes a point when there is just not enough left of something to keep running. When the entire top of the old rotary mower was nothing but rust and holes with not enough metal left to weld patches WTF is you advice to keep it running? Hate to tell you but a lot of quality New Stuff works circles around the best of the old stuff. I know this because I have ran the 1940s-1970s equipment for the last 40 years and it was these best of its time period but not even close to the newer equipment in performance. And gee I drive a 52 year old truck, a 22 year old truck and 18 year old truck so naaaaaaaaaaa I don't rebuild old stuff and keep it running at all.
[QUOTE="why did they steal yours?[/QUOTE] Looks like have stolen A LOT of peoples other than mine. Wonder why they didn't find you and steal yours.
Let me rephrase that, "When are you going to learn to IMMEDIATELY rebuild the new stuff that you buy...like before you even use it"!?
Looks like have stolen A LOT of peoples other than mine. Wonder why they didn't find you and steal yours.[/QUOTE] I think that I'm safe from those guys thanks to the price of gas and their inability to read a map! B.ut from that photo there seemed to be PLENTY of scrap metal close at hand without ever leaving the farm
