Brake grease more expensive than printer ink?

The printer ink is the classic “razor blade business model”. Sell the razor handle and one blade at cost, sell refills to make the money AND it tethers the buyer to that brand for a long time.

That $149 printer with the 1/4 filled “mini” ink cartridges is a great buy. Until you need the $30 black ink cartridge refill and the three $90 color refills that only come from the printer manufacturer. NO incentive at all to commonize!

Those little packs are like buying Advil at the sandwich shop - 2 pills for, what, $1.00?

For the pros, no way, buy in bulk. But you do pay for convenience. I haven’t priced those little packets lately but it seems like they were less than $3 last time I bought any. If you only do a brake job once every 5 years or so, the little packets are convenient.

NO incentive at all to commonize!

They’ve gotten even more devious too. Many inkjets have transferred the print heads from the printer to the cartridge. Cartridge-based print heads are much flimsier than the permanent ones that are part of the printer. What this boils down to is that if you’re lucky they will last through a 2nd refill, but usually no more than that. This cuts down on people refilling their ink carts, forcing them to buy new.

Funny that @mustangman; mentioned razors. That’s one of my pet peeves.

It seems to me that they make all these twin, triple, and quad razors and advertise that they work better. I find that the blades of a triple or quad bladed razor are spaced just close enough together to get clogged up with whiskers after a few shaves, and then they cut nothing.
I finally went back to the old double edged safety razor and am happy I did. A blade will last me weeks as long as I rest it on it’s end when done…so the water can drain and the blade dry.

I know, I know…you all thought that I was so tough…I chewed the whiskers off from the inside!!!

Yosemite

Razor ?..Norelco electric !
Printer ? same as at work. Supply clerk buys in bulk, white box.

I t really gripes me at the amount ,they charge for those little packets of goop(I feel that ought to let you have them as a courtesy,can you imagine the profit margin on those things) Okay one little query thats not auto,can somebody recommend a good,economical inkjet printer?

@kmccune … I can give a shout-out for Canon’s customer service anyway. I rarely print things, so I can’t say about how well they work or their reliability. But I had a Canon printer that broke last summer and I phoned them up, explaining the problem, and they politely – and in completely understandable English with excellent phone line sound quality – they walked me through a debug session, then said it was a known problem and they were johnny on the spot to get me a replacement printer within just a couple of days. In fact it was so convenient I was sitting on the cement fixing my leaf blower, covered in grease from head to toe one afternoon, I look up and there’s the UPS driver walking up and he deposits the replacement printer next to me!

I used used to drive my Dodge Dakota in overdrive on the freeway( car related) to a place where they took your old cartridge in trade and gave you a refilled one. But that in the long run was not noticeably cheaper.

We have a HP Inkjet and the best prices I found for the ink cartridges is through
Comp and Save.com. As a matter of fact when the first ones arrived, I thought that they sent the wrong ones. They were bigger. They fit and I presume the larger size…means that there may be a little more ink in them.

I happened to find a comparison of cartridges on line somewhere and found that their cartridges printed more pages than any other.

I also went into my printer settings and set it so all printing is done as a draft unless you select
the better quality. I can’t tell the difference, but we use much less ink.

Yosemite

This product works very well on brake hardware as well as rubber components

and the tube is very convenient.

I bought a tube maybe 15 years ago at Carquest. Don’t remember what I paid but probably $7+. It’s a lifetime supply for me.

I ordered a tube of grease for my lawn tractor transmission since I was going to open it up and replace the bushings and inspect it. Book cautions to replace the grease but it was something like $24 for a single tube. I guess its special stuff but still haven’t pulled the trans apart and winter is flying by. Maybe next year. I should put the grease in a safe deposit box though at that price.

napa also has silglyde

it’s great stuff, but for a pro, that tube wouldn’t last more than a few days, at best

The makers of inkjet printers have followed the business model of the heroine dealers. With the prices just about the same.

I solved the razor problem. You should see my big bushy beard!

Re: the subject of the thread, brake grease and other automotive lubricants, buying any of them I small volumes costs a fortune IF you think of it as a “per volume” cost… but it isn’t sold “per-volume”. The average person rarely uses large volumes of these things, and when the do use it they don’t want to have a garage full of enough automotive lubricants to last them 100 years. I know I don’t. Take for example bulb lubricant. Most people don’t even know it exists. Even though I use it for my home lightbulbs as well as on the car, the stuff is messy, and I’d rather have a small packet or tube for a few bucks than a long-term large-volume supply. The same with antiseize compound. That stuff is very messy, and I’d rather not have a large supply hanging around. When I do use it, I use it sparingly, and a small tube lasts forever.

I’ve got so many tubes of stuff that I’ve bought, used once or twice, and haven’t used again, that I just bought a clear plastic multicompartment box just to put all those messy tubes in. I’ve got bulb lube, white lithium grease, antiseize, Loctite red and Loctite blue, batter terminal anticorrosion grease, liquid metal, silicone grease, muffler patch, tire tube contact cement (for my bikes), two-part epoxy, and probably a dozen others… I just realized I’ll need a bigger compartmentalized storage box…

The bottom line is that you can’t think of these things as being “per-volume” prices.

mountainbike

You didn’t mention blinker fluid

I buy it by the gallon

Yup, I think I have a tube of blinker fluid too… {:smiley:
Actually, does bulb lube count? I really do have a packet of bulb lube.

All jokes aside,is bulb lube the same as dielectric grease?
And thanks for the advice on the printers.
Now what would be the closet to a universal replace all substance for the auto shop?(Or a universal lubricant?)

Those tubes of Brake Lube might last longer than you think. Of course buying them by the carton cut the price considerably and the tubes are more convenient than the jars with brushes.

As for bulb grease, Lubriplate made an aerosol white (actually yellow) grease that was supposedly the product that was coating all the under hood connections for the ignition and ECU on Fords, etc. I found it on line in a tube

http://www.superkleendirect.com/lubriplateds-es13735pnl0137-03535lbdrum.aspx

it works great keeping bayonet connectors clean and corrosion free virtually forever. I use it to lubricate light bulb sockets these days.

Size matters. Buy it in the size most useful for you. I just finished a tub of moly bearing great I’ve had for 35 years. Just don’t use it anymore with sealed bearings. At least it didn’t go 'bad". A tube of 3M weatherstrip cement dries up long before I can use the whole tube. When I bought the big tube, it was all I could find and most got wasted. I have a tiny tube of dielectric silicon grease that is just about the right size. I’ve had it a few years but it doesn’t go solid and I use it to grease plug wires and other electrical connections. Works on brake slider pins, too.

I use a lot of printer ink. I drive about an hour each way to a town, where we also can buy certain groceries not available in our village. There is a man who refills HP cartridges for 40 pesos each, color or Black. That is more or less three dollars each.

I usually have ten or fifteen to refill.

Not all of them work, but the cost of refilling all of them is around the cost of one brand new cartridge in Mexico. That man has a complex system involving hypodermic needles and an ultrasonic cleaner, but he gets the job done and picks up some money.

HP has different cartridges in Mexico for the same machine. A cheaper US cartridge simply will not work on the same model in Mexico. You are allowed to call them one time to change over, if you move your printer to the other country. Clearly a price control thing.

I had thought of getting a laser printer, but that man said if I go north for a couple months, the hoses will dry up and new ones will cost nearly 100 dollars.

There are two ways to go that village. One is in the boonies. The other one involves a project to wide the road to four-lane to Tecamachalco. So, I use the boonie route. A lot of speed bumps and towns, but still better than going through a major construction site.

The dielectric grease tubes deteriorate after a few years. I salvaged what I could from my old tube, scooping it into a pickle jar.