Just as satisfying as rescuing an abused, malnourished puppy.

Absolutely enjoyable to watch and to see and tool be brought back to life.

I got interested in the economics of that refurb.

Looks like a new Gressel vice of roughly the same type can be bought for 550 Francs, which is just very slightly more than 550 US Dollars.

Nothing specific is said about time spent on the repair, other than getting off that one plate took "30 minutes of hammering", which is cut down to roughly 10 seconds of video. I figure that was a particularly time consuming caper to end up being the only thing shown where time spent was specifically mentioned. Some tiny bits of what we saw were roughly real-time, where all the work spent on a specific item was shown 1:1 in the video. But, lots of other stuff was probably somewhere between that 10 seconds : 30 minutes and 1:1 range.

I think a very conservative guess would be that each minute of video represented at least 30 minutes of work. So, 17 minute video x 30 = 510 minutes. Divided by 60 = 8.5 hours. As an extremely conservative estimate -- could easily be five or ten times that, particularly with lawyer-type "billable hours" consideration on what constitutes "work time".

But with that conservative estimate, he worked for (at the very least) 8.5 hours to repair something that could have been replaced for $550. Not including the new replacement smooth grips, etc. That's about $65 per hour. For extremely skilled labor.

I'm not mocking that at all -- I actually agree that it was quite satisfying to watch. But I think that just reaffirms that there must have been some real passion for the work there to decide to go through that very fiddly and skilled labor for what was likely much more than 8.5 hours rather than buying a new one and calling it a day. Not much of that kind of work ethic left these days -- and I sure as hell include myself in that!

(edited )

From what i can tell he does this because he's passionate about it and how getting feedback from his videos is what brings him the most joy (his reddit comment). I think it has very little to do with anything financial. Although the yt ad revenue for this video is easily into the thousands (1.6 million views). One of these a week, with those numbers, could easily make him a comfortable living.

Another one of his videos on the sift.

1930s German Spiral Jack Restorration -- Bilstein 2500 Kg has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

I wasn't thinking about including YT ad revenue in the economics, but I guess that certainly could be counted and definitely motivate many people.

However, I guess that confirms that it is passion for the work, the machines themselves, and the feedback that are the primary motivators for him. Would probably still be doing these repairs even if YT income / encouraging feedback wasn't a factor, and even without more traditional motivators like plans to resell or use the repaired devices.

I guess the closest parallel would be repairs and restorations for museum displays. There's a financial element there too, but the people doing the restorations do that job more for the love of the objects and seeing them restored.

guy spends more than just time on these restorations, he spends a good bit on paints and parts, what is impressive here is the result.

Its always going to be cheaper/easier to get a chinese knock off, but really the most impressive thing about these vids for me is how well made old stuff was. Premium shit was meant to last multiple generations. For most product niches nowadays, makers that care about durability are few and far between, on the contrary, designers and engineers have been punished by greed and beancounters doing a good job for their masters for committing the sin of making something that doesnt need to be replaced

i just re read my comment, and please omit the chinese from my criticism which is directed entirely at capitalism and multinational corporations, the chinese IMO are not to blame for greedy western multinationals selling themselves out so they could buy everyone and keep themselves on top, they were the ones with power and control who set these conditions

*timeshift, *engineering

Adding video to channels (Engineering, Timeshift) - requested by Zawash.

Big multinational corporations are responsible for outsourcing to China, but the Chinese companies do indeed do quite a bit of copying on their own. Any popular product is going to get copied by 50 others trying to make a living, it's a result of their legal system I guess.