A Truck-Load of Bargains from Euro Auctions

This week the trailer got a rest. Pete had been on a bit of a shopping spree, so we loaded up the Iveco and drove across the country to Euro Auctions near Leeds to collect a load of new kit for the workshop. Some of it we genuinely needed. Some of it we didn’t know existed until Pete decided we couldn’t live without it.

If you’d rather watch than read, jump straight to the video here.

Aircon Made of Ice

Before we set off, there was one problem we had to address: the Iveco doesn’t have air conditioning, and it was the middle of the British summer. So we threw together our own. It’s an old cool box with ice in it, some pipes, and an extractor fan that sucks air through the system and pushes ice-cold air out through a couple of little directional vents. Is it really aircon? Probably not. Did it keep us cool for the whole drive? Surprisingly, yes.

The whole thing ran off our BLUETTI Elite 300 power station, sat between the seats. More on that further down, because it did a lot of work this episode. We made a longer video about the aircon build itself — the whole painful saga of trying to make it work — and that will be up soon on our second channel, the Long Road To Off Grid.

A Sea of Diggers

If you’ve never heard of it, Euro Auctions is a massive auction house that sells mostly plant machinery — diggers, excavators, tractors, vehicles — but also power tools, and the odd fire engine, swimming pool, and shipping container houses. It has sites all over the world. We pulled into a yard that was, as far as the eye could see, plant machinery and a literal sea of excavator buckets. There were tiny ride-on excavators, remote-controlled skid-steers, remote-controlled lawnmowers. Pete was in heaven and a little bit anxious about being in everyone’s way.

The reason we started looking here in the first place was actually quite sensible: they had bathrooms built into containers, and our new workshop doesn’t have a toilet. That was the whole plan. But the shower/toilet container rooms went for loads of money, so we came away without one. New plan — bring the shed from the old place and build a bathroom in it. The office becomes the bathroom shed.

Loading up took hours, and the guys there were brilliant with us. Then it was the long drive home to unload and see what Pete had actually done.

The Great Unboxing

Back at the workshop, we went through it all one box at a time, smallest first.

• Two angle grinders — a four-inch and a five-inch, both cordless, 21V, both lovely and light with a proper paddle switch, which beats the corded one we’ve got that needs two thumbs to turn on.
• A small drill, a quarter-inch screwdriver, 2 half-inch electric ratcheting sockets (in two different lengths), and a straight die grinder (to replace ours, which Pete may or may not have blown up).
• Every single tool came with two batteries and a charger. By the end we’d built a small pyramid: 14 batteries and 7 chargers, a mix of 4Ah and 2Ah.

Most of this is a mystery brand — “Boss Beswell”. Pete looked them up and the reviews are good, and in the hand everything feels surprisingly solid. Each tool kit was between £40 and £90..

Then the box that made no sense at first: a set of enormous bow shackles. Four of them, far bigger than we’d realised from the listing photo. The whole box was £10 — worth more than that in scrap steel alone. We have no idea what we’ll use them for yet. Towing a ship, possibly.

The £300 Tool Chest

The one Pete’s wanted for ages. Three hundred pounds sounds like a lot for a tool chest until you open it and find it’s fully kitted out — a torque wrench, ratcheting spanners, screwdrivers, allen and torx keys, pliers of every type, gloves, a little hammer, punches, and a spare drawer to fill yourself. There’s even a secret cubby hole for secrets. It’s got a slightly dated motorbike graphic on the front and it’s that same mystery brand again.

We actually bought two of these — the second one’s for Pete’s dad, who got in on the action.

The Big Stuff

We also came home with:

• A new massive 24-drawer workbench with a nice wood top for £375. These are usually really expensive. It’s still up on the truck for now because we need a forklift to get it down.
• An old £40 air compressor that may or may not work. Pete mostly wanted it for the tank, as a secondary air receiver.
• A new three-in-one strimmer (£100) — strimmer head, hedge trimmer and a little chainsaw-on-a-pole — bought purely on impulse because it was so cheap.
• An old mast lift for £100. You stand on a platform and it goes up 4.6 metres on a multi-stage mast, and it moves around on a pallet-truck-style base with its own electric drive motor, powered by 12V batteries hidden under the flaps. A hundred pounds. We put it on charge off the BLUETTI to see if it’d wake up.
• A second lift for £175, this one completely manual on casters, so no electronics to worry about — except the back wheel’s seized, possibly a stuck brake or something jammed in there. We both had a go riding it to the ceiling.

The electric mast lift was actually too heavy to bring down on the tail lift: it’s over 600kg and the tail lift’s only rated for 500. Add it to the fix-it pile.

Not everything made the cut. There was a big industrial floor scrubber for £30 that turned out to be completely knackered — no batteries, and the squeegee that sucks the water back up was missing entirely — so we left it. Pete also very nearly bought an actual ride-on road sweeper, the kind you see trundling down the side of the road. That one was creeping up towards two grand, so it stayed where it was.

The Even Bigger Machine

Pete’s been dreaming about this for years, waiting until we had a workshop big enough to justify it.

It’s a forklift. His first one. Brand new, 2026, two-tonne, and electric — a no-name China-brand machine, so what could possibly go wrong! The forks side-shift, they go in and out, they tilt forwards and backwards, and it’s a two-stage mast that lifts around four metres. Pete won it for just £1,750.

It’s too big to take home ourselves, so it’s being delivered next week — which means the workbench stays on the truck until it arrives. And after very solemnly reminding himself not to drive home with the keys, Pete drove home with the keys. We’ve posted them back.

So, How Much?

Time for the damage. Everything we kept, at hammer prices and not counting the chest for Pete’s dad, came to £3,320. Then you add 10% auction fees and 20% VAT, and it lands at £4,382.40.

Half of that was the forklift. And here’s how we’re choosing to look at it: £4,000 is about what you’d pay for a used two-tonne forklift in fair condition anyway, and this one’s brand new — so really we paid a great price for a brand new electric forklift, and everything else came free. We quite like that maths.