Wow this topic really took off since I posted my little rant. Like Gizmo, I suspect I will still be tinkering and collecting old mowers till I kark it too, and as Norm says, mowers are far more interesting than anything on the TV.
"Reality" TV has gone only one way and that is downhill. It has become more like "un-Reality" if you ask me! And even the once popular "Nay-bores" has become a bit too "modern" (shall we say) for my tastes. I soon tire of it and switch it off.
Norm, the loss of restorable machinery due to stripping down for parts is something that irks me as well. Postage and freight has gotten so out of hand that people are getting more value out of stripping down old mowers and machinery and selling off the parts bit by bit. I recently saw an old Rover Economy being sold a piece at a time on Flea-Bay. The thing is the mower had still been running and only needed a bit of TLC. I have also heard of people buying old mowers from the tip that would be repairable, but they take only remove the few parts they need and throw the rest back into the tip again. A local mower shop gets so inundated with old mowers that they are now dumping them straight into the skips, without even bothering to check if they go or not. But if you ask them for a price they always want top dollar for them.
The other thing that irks me at present is the rising cost of stickers and stencils. When this little backyard sticker "industry" first started, it seemed to follow closely on the heels of other cottage/craft hobbies at the time, like scrapbooking. Materials were cheap. So you could get a custom sticker or decal made for just a few dollars. Over the past few years there are less and less people offering to make "one-off" stickers and decals. Now you ask for a quote and they tell you they will only do minimum orders of 1000 or more. So unless you want to fork out a few thousand dollars for a sticker and spend the rest of your life trying to sell the rest on Flea-bay, there is not much point to the exercise. There are lots of stickers and decals still for sale of course, but the price keeps climbing ever higher on these as well. I recently tried to reproduce a small sticker for a 70s Rover mower that wasn't available online. I shopped around, but the cheapest place I could find that could make a one-off UV resistant sticker was over $35 per sticker. About 10 years ago I could have got one made for about $5 on Flea-Bay. And many places now add on a charge for detailing the graphic, which can end up being very expensive. You are paying for someone's time and many people now consider themselves professionals at their game. Our computerized world is making things more convenient but also more expensive. Just look at 3-D printing - the plastic is fairly cheap (so far) but the scanning, and re-drawing for the graphics work, and final preparation can take days and cost as much as $300 per item.
Yes it will be interesting to see where Trump's international trade war will take us. I strongly suspect people will all end up paying more for less, or will just give up and not buy anything except essentials like food and clothes. It is difficult to understand why world economists seem determine to send us back to the "good old days" of the 1930s. America wasn't so great back then! Or will Russia and North Korea end up being our main trading partners in future and we will experience another boom time? Who knows? The future is always very hard to predict.
