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How to Get Hobby Supplies More Cheaply - A Guide.
🕑 Added 2022-01-10 09:13:45 +0000 UTCHi guys!
TDLR reasoning for the post at the bottom!
The Resin links are here, the Resin section is at the bottom of the page you land on!
This guide was initially made to help with resin costs, but is equally applicable to most hobby supplies :)
Cheap resin is a matter of two factors - volume and research.
Volume is pretty straightforward, its simple economies of scale, you buy more, it gets cheaper. But for resin this is far more crucial than a lot of other materials. The sheer price increase per litre for buying resin in small amounts is insane. It goes from £24/L to £10/L! The best thing you can do for your wallet, is line up several resin projects back to back, and buy a large bottle at once.
The second issue is more ephemeral, and one I initially assumed wasn’t actually a problem, until I started getting approached regularly for advice on how to find things locally by audience members and patrons
Trying to help as always I would go off and do a quick google search for their country, and try and find some local shops with the material they wanted, or the material they had found, but at a less stupidly expensive price. I've always been able to do this for myself quite naturally, but the more these issues come up the more I'm realising not everyone knows where to look, or what to search for.
This leads me to two things. Firstly, with the help from you guys, I'm now curating a list of webstores where you can buy affordable resin in various countries. This is the shortcut. Scroll down to the resin at the bottom :)
What I will also do, is briefly describe what I do to find this kind of stuff, because this is a skill that can be used on almost any crafting material, or…anything really, and save you a ton of money.
Feel free to skip this if I'm saying stuff that you already know, but I know now that it isn't obvious to everyone, and there's nothing wrong with that!
I say 'I don't know' all the time. And then I learn. And make something cooler.
Anyway, I start off by searching for the material we need, with as much detail as needed to bring up the material we are actually looking for.
Searching 'resin' on Google or Amazon will bring up options, but they might be mixed in with UV resin for jewellery, 3d printer resin, and tons of other products taking up valuable screen space for comparison. So I narrow it. 'epoxy resin' is enough to get it down to the type we want, and we now have lots to compare.
Its worth noting that searching 'two part epoxy resin', which is technically correct, can bring up tons of the little syringe glue resin products instead, which are definitely not what we're looking for (and are expensive for what you get!)
Anyway, aside from that, even once you've searched for epoxy resin there's usually a lot of small volumes listed, so pick a large volume we'd be happy with for a big project or two, like 3l or 4.5l, and search for those. Or even do both in two tabs.
That’s another trick I use a lot, slight variations can let you find options you would never have found otherwise...
This is what I'm talking about with volume incidentally. Just look at the price and volume difference between the two on the left and the one on the right. The right has 1/9th the resin for only 1/2 the price, making it more than FOUR TIMES as expensive!
Now we've got two lists, almost entirely made up of the stuff we want, and the volume we want. Now for stage 3. Crash google chrome by opening too many tabs...and split each potential product onto its own tab.
Now we've got a ton of options, lets go through and thin the herd a bit.
- I double check the description of each one is actually the right material, and it doesn’t say polyester resin, or some other kind now we've clicked through.
- I check any drop down boxes are set to the volume and material I actually want, which is something easily missed.
- I close any that are way too expensive per Litre - bearing in mind the less you buy, the more expensive it becomes.
Then I compare what's left and add up the price and delivery price, to get the real price.
For stores that aren't amazon, you can usually find a 'delivery info' page to find the delivery cost, or otherwise just add to checkout and see what it is there, without buying.
And then find the cheapest one.
The key here is not limiting yourself. Sometimes amazon is cheaper, sometimes its not.
VERY often the cheapest result is absolutely not on the first page of results. Scroll through as many pages as you can.
Small companies that offer good prices, the gems that get us the best deal, are rarely large or savvy enough to pay a fortune for SEO (search engine optimisation) or ad spots on google or amazon to get on page one.
I hope this little guide is useful, this is literally the technique I use myself and can be used with different search terms to find nearly any hobby material at the best price.
Please bear in mind that if you don't buy through the amazon links in the equipment list though, the channel doesn’t get any support, so if I save you a ton of money, maybe up your pledge a bit to balance it out :)
My reasoning for the post over a video:
So partway through trying to record this as an actual video I decided it was taking far too much time to get clips of my actions that actually showed the types of things that can happen when searching for products - mainly because there's no way to guarantee certain problems will actually happen for the camera/screen recording!
So instead, I've decided to do it as a text post, which gives all of the info in an easy to reference format anyway - and make the second bonus video a shorter one just going through the resin experiments and issues to avoid :)
Comments
PensiveBadger
Good point! Help still definitely appreciated though 😂
David Watts
When searching for other countries and such, set your VPN location to the country. That’ll make Google or whatever search engine you use think that’s where you are and give you local info. Thanks for all you do!
PensiveBadger
I may add images to this post before public release, I just wanted to get it out to you guys ASAP :)
