Sunday, September 20, 2015

End of the big bottle

No Mek

January 2012. I bought the biggest bottle of Slaters Mek-Pak I could.

Last week, I finally finished it off. That works out less than a fiver a year for liquid glue. It's not like I'm a light user of the stuff either. WHen I work with plastic, I slosh it around like it's going out of fashion.

Who says model making is expensive?

6 comments:

James said...

You can buy it for much less via Amazon! I bought a litre for £10 a couple of months back - that'll keep me going for a long time!

Previously I paid £5 for a 100ml bottle from Wizard Models - that's £50 a litre, that's a nice bit of profiteering for some one I think!

Phil Parker said...

You always pay more for the smaller quantities. The £10 per litre is "profiteering" as a tanker load would be much cheaper per litre.

James said...

There's a profit to be made at all levels of the supply chain (otherwise, no one would bother I guess!) but for many cottage type industries the proportion of profit on an item is normally as high as that of the 100ml mek. My wife's former employers used to buy butanone by the barrel for cleaning screen printing equipment, buy it in that quantity and it's very cheap! But when a product accounts for just 5% of the purchase price...

There's a reason why I much prefer working for a publicly owned company which provides a public service and whose profits are reinvested over my previous hideously corporate employer :-)

Colin 't Hart said...

Wish MEK was available here in Sweden...

James said...

Colin, there's bound to be a supplier of butanone (which is a more common name for the chemical) in Sweden. It's used for cleaning items in the printing industry so hopefully a supplier will be easy to find inline.

Colin t'Hart said...

Thanks, James. In Swedish it's called "Butanon". Is 2-Butanon the same thing? It doesn't seem to be so cheap... like £23 for half a litre.