When is a club , a club ?

Your first question Firstly  why don't many more members contribute ?

I assume you mean contributing to the forum? Surely its personal choice there are no compulsory rules that members must contribute, many are perhaps not IT savvy & others just content to follow the the comments & advice. 

Many members do contribute in other ways, there are articles in Grass Box magazine just received by members that I have not seen on forum, also many contribute by attending the annual rally at Milton Keynes.

As to your question What's the point of being a member  if not.?

The club is much larger than the forum, our quarterly magazine alone is easily worth the annual subscription, then we have the excellent items available in the shop, a vast amount of information on the website etc & a great annual rally, plus other events. There are many reasons to be a member without participating on the forum!

As to prices of mowers etc, its a free market, you cannot dictate what prices people should sell items for, and I don't believe you can dictate that other members should give you a preferential price. Many of us do help other members, but its up to the individual.

Whilst the auction does throw up some apparent bargains, this has become a bit of a tradition, members taking along surplus mowers, perhaps rather than scrapping them. I regularly scrap many mowers of similar type to those that appear in the auction as there is no market for them, there are many out there & we cannot accommodate them all.

Grass boxes for mowers can sometimes be quite scarce, I believe I offered you some brackets for a Ransomes Anglia box a while back, to have a pair cast you would have to pay £70+ so an original pair for £30 would be quite reasonable. Many of us value our time & getting out an item for sale, obtaining packing material, trip to the post office etc, why should we give things away for a couple of pounds!

I hope this helps your understanding.

I agree with Clive. Some people’s lives can change suddenly and they often find they have less time to contribute than when they first joined. Take myself for example - for two years I contributed heavily to most aspects of the club. Since then my elderly mother has gone into a situation of end of life care, I’ve had a serious operation myself and I’ve come out of retirement to run a couple of businesses employing over 700 people !  This has severely impinged on any spare time. However I do contribute when I can. 
All I can say is I enjoy remaining a member and participating in events and discussions when time allows. I don’t really see why I should have to explain why I don’t contribute as much as I did. 
As for mower and grassbox prices I am continually surprised. One example is when I was looking for a grassbox for one of my Shanks Small mowers I bought an original box in excellent condition for £65 for which I was happy to pay to make a very special mower even more so. However about four months later I happened on another box in a local Brocante barn near Rye and paid only £12 for it ! It came in handy as I have 3 of that model of mower of differing ages. 
I always believe if you need something that someone else has you pay what you are happy to pay or walk away. Invariably the person comes back to you anyway with a lower price as the market is limited. I hope this explains my situation.

'Helpful Members?' ...............I put comments/photos on the forum of newly acquired push mowers and hope that they are of interest to other members and usually, along with my forum post, I am asking for help obtaining copies of sales literature, operator instructions or guidance on how best to repair,restore,obtain parts etc and have always had replies offering assistance. To obtain copies of sales literature/advice etc for my mostly over 50 year old mowers, some older than this as well is wonderful as not many turn up on the popular on-line auction sites.... (I better not say how much I have paid for some that have appeared on the Bay of E just in case my wife reads this!!). For those harder to find items I am always more than grateful to other members who take the time to dig out what they have and then share with me. With regards to obtaining Grass Boxes and other mower parts. Due to the 'Old Mowers' no longer being in production I don't expect I am the only member who has purchased another identical machine just to obtain some hard to find parts to finish a project. In my experience, Helpful Members?, the answer is Yes.

Clearly Iam a minority voice as a member. 

If I had a part I didn't need or use ,I would happily give it away to an enthusiast , rather than try to extract unreasonable amounts of money as a chancer.

Another point is that posting stuff is a hassle.

I have a few spare grassboxes, and while i might well give them free to a member who came to visit. I wouldn't contemplate posting them for less than £20 due to the time of packaging them, driving to a post office, waiting, negotiating with the teller and Recieving money over the internet.

Shipping couldn’t be easier!

You can contact one of the many courier services such as DPD, UPS for example via their website requesting your package (Grass box) to be collected from your home address to be delivered to the recipient!  If I was giving the grass box for free, I would of course not expect to pay for the shipping. It’s just a question of packing the grass box in a suitable box, printing off the address label, obtain a contact number and email address of the receiver. It most cases collection of the item from your home address is usually the next business day in which the courier will give you a collection time slot window. That way you can be ready to handover the parcel to the courier.

Once the parcel has been scanned, the receiver will get a text message and or email that the package is on its way. You don’t need to leave the comfort of your house to send packages anymore.

Job done!!!

Job done! Were it as easy as that ?!

Unless one is a regular “seller” and geared up for despatching, finding a suitable box / carton, protective packing etc to ensure that the item can survive the rigours it’s journey around the courier’s multiple transhipments and around their “hub”, can be a problem . A grass box taped up in a black bin bag may arrive with more dents than it left with. Wrapping a cutting cylinder in a couple of yards of carpet underlay and then balancing on the bathroom scales clutching said cutting cylinder to weigh it can be interesting. 
Even Courier collection requires adequate compensation !

I can't speak for anyone else, but my lack of use of the club has not been through lazy-ness or lack of interest, its more to do with major life changing events and putting this passion I share on hold.

I try and snatch some time to look in occasionally but there is rarely anything I can contribute to but I am hopeful that things will change for the better and perhaps I can return to this love of old lawnmowers at a later date.

All my Best,

John