Buying 2nd hand gear online.

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Diver0001

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My daughter recently got her diving certificate and I wanted to buy her a *good* quality set of gear. She had a mask and full-foot fins but that's it.

Now, in case you don't know me, I work as an instructor at a shop where I live that gives my key-man discounts but even at that, for the gear I wanted for her, I was staring down the pipe of a pretty chunk of change.

I did have some odds-and-ends laying around. I had 3 regulators that I wasn't using, including an Auqalung LX surpreme and a Titan. So I started by putting odds and ends together and getting this serviced for her. cost to me: €100- including all new hoses and a complete overhaul because my wife said, "you're not going to let her dive with that old junk". (personally I didn't think I'd ever hear anyone call a Legend LX supreme "old junk" but by getting it completely refurbished from the ground up allayed her fears.)

I also had a compass and a bottom timer, a couple of lights etc etc but decided to invest a bit.

For the bits I was missing, I decided to go the "ebay" route (locally called "marktplaats"). This post is about my experience with this.

Problem number 1 ... a good 90-95% of everything you see online is

- broken
- badly serviced
- completely worn out
- pieced out and not complete
- "B" Quality junk
- really old
or
- the wrong size

The main warning in this for the uninitiated is that if you are not intimately familiar with scuba gear then either have someone as a "go to" person who is, or don't buy 2nd hand gear online, because you WILL get screwed.

Much to my surprise, however, there is a regular stream of fairly well maintained recent gear as well..... much of it was the wrong size but there seems to be no shortage of decent 2nd hand gear available as long as.... and here's the crux, YOU ARE NOT IN A HURRY, which I wasn't.

Problem number 2 is that people don't really understand the 2nd hand market and/or have a good sense of what used gear is really worth. It would appear that they go to an online shop and look up the retail price and then offer about 1/2 of that and go up from there ...... DUUUUHHHHHH.. With the amount of gear being put online 2nd hand, I decided to start by offering 10-20% of the retail value and then work up from there. If you get in early and start low then other interested parties will bid you up from a low starting price... not some ridiculous 50-60% starting price. The trick to this is to be the early bird. I checked the site every day at 7am and made sure that I was the first one to bid on anything new I wanted. The take-home message here is that some of the people bidding on ebay are the same idiots who come home from Mexico with $200 sombreros. If one of them starts bidding on your item, then just give up. Don't get married to the idea of having a particular thing. Let them screw themselves, don't let them screw you. Again, patience.

What helped is to contact the seller early and engage them in emails. I don't know if you can do that on ebay but the local system here allows for that. Building up any kind of rapport with the seller can really help. Tell them why you're looking for such an item, get them enthusiastic about your particular case, ask them questions about their case.... basically talk to them. It's amazing how well this works. In doing this, I got a pair of booties and new-in-the-box Mares Avantii Quattro fins for my daughter for next to nothing because the woman who was selling them found it "charming" that I wanted to dive with my daughter. I assume this said more about her relationship with her own father than the relationship between me and my daughter, but she sincerely wanted to "facilitate" that and I was happy to give her that chance. We both came away from that deal feeling really good..... so engaging the seller in conversation can really help.

Finding a reasonably modern computer was easy enough. There is a steady stream of Suunto's and Mares computers on the 2nd hand market. Caveat here is that Suunto computers have an EPIC reputation for being "self divers" (ie, they are broken) so when you buy a 2nd hand Suunto 2nd hand you absolutely MUST pick it up before any money changes hands and inspect it. The Zoop and Gekko are infamous for this. Certain Mares computers are well know for eating batteries, etc. In this case I used my connections to get a short list of decent recent computers and focused only on those.

The hardest thing to find online was a decent BCD. There are lots of them for sale but I was very particular about what I wanted. I wanted one with a good inflator, which meant a 2nd hand Seaquest. To date, literally nobody on the market has made an inflator that ever comes close. I even put a seaquest inflator on my diverite wing. (Diverite inflators suck balls imo). There are lots of Seaquests for sale.... 20 year old ones...... broken ones..... size large, worn out, leaking..... There are also a great many more Cressi's, which have HORRENDOUS inflators, Mares but mostly Dragonfly's and HUB's which are too bulky (and the HUB is still a potential death trap in my mind, especially a 2nd hand one), Tusa's and other 2nd rank ones, which are often flimsy, and Scubapro's which have crappy cam-bands but some have ok inflators.... There are also a fair number of low-end BCD's on the 2nd hand market that aren't weight integrated, which I wanted for her...... I didn't want a BPW at this point (her buoyancy control doesn't need that kind of help) but a hybrid was ok...... is so all in all I settled on buying her a 2nd hand Diva LX..... and it took months (nearly a year) of waiting and bidding on the few that came up. Eventually I found a last generation one with a dozen (according to log books) dives on it that I bought for more than I wanted to pay but less than it was probably worth.

The easiest thing to get online is a tank and weights. Tanks are either certified or they're junk. The hydro'd ones come up often and mostly people just want them out of their house. You can pick up one with a recent hydro for €30-50. If you buy lead at a diveshop then you really need to get your head examined. At the shops here they sell it for about €13/kg. Online you can buy it for €1-2/kg if you pick it up. A few years ago I bought a sh-load of lead and a couple of weight belts for I think €0,80/kg from someone who wanted it out of his house. I put it in a box in my car. People are always stealing (forgetting to return) lead so I took 1/2 of it to the shop as a gift to them and kept about 20kg in my car for students to use (ergo my students are never the suspects).

In the end I gave my daughter:

- A Legend LX supreme, rebuilt from the ground up (one of my old regs)
- Suunto Viper with 89 dives on it - fully functioning, battery full.
- Seaquest Diva with 12 dives on it
- Mares fins and boots, new
- Cressi mask
- Suunto compass with probably 700 dives on it - fully functional
- Weights and weightbelt from my spare parts

Decent set of beginner's gear, if you ask me. A lot better than what I had when I started diving...... My total out-of-pocket cost was round about €300,- but as I said, I already had the reg. If I had to buy the reg then it would have been €400 total, 2nd hand.

I bought a wetsuit and gloves new from the rack. She insisted on it. The idea of diving in a 2nd hand suit that was formed to someone else's body and/or peed in by someone else was her argument. I figured it was ok to buy at least one thing new so I didn't push the issue. With the discount at the shop I picked up a 7mm XCEL for her for about €180.

So rounded off putting together a complete set of A quality gear based on some nearly new 2nd components costs round about €600,-

I assume I did well. I feel good about it anyway. I hope this posts helps someone who is looking online for the "big ticket" items and is trying to get some grip in the process.

R..
 
Think you did really well with that.

I priced up a full set of equipment at my LDS and am looking at £2-2.5k ( €2.7-3.3k).

Needless to say I will probably be looking at sales/Ebay/Gumtree for a lot of kit.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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