I used to live in Berkeley, CA circa 2013. They had a tool library, which was part of the local public library system, and tools were free (!) to rent. I miss it everyday, as it was a godsend for broke new grads who still wanted to do some quick but heavyduty DIY.
I now live in NYC, and my local Home Depot rents out power tools for $20-30/day. The typical tool would pay for itself in 2 days at these rates, but it's still worth it to me as these 2 days are often 2-3 years apart and I'd rather not store these tools in my cramped 1BR.
What I would love is a community-run tool rental service where we can donate a tool + pay a nominal membership fee, and borrow tools for free. I am happy to donate a $120 circular saw/impact driver if I can rent 10x different tools once each for $5/mo for the next year. The closest thing I have now is my local hackerspace, which is great, but I often have to work on my projects at the space, which limits the kind of home DIY I can do.
I feel like you need to make sure the rental side is the first thing people see.
My initial reaction at being dumped on the "Explore" section was "this is just a spammy pinterest style link aggregator thing".
I like the idea. The rental section has a lot of potential imo. It makes me wonder if there’s room for the personal property rental business in tools like there is for housing and cars.
I do a lot of DIY and tend to acquire a lot of the tools I use if I think they are generic enough or I’ll repeat a similar job in the future but there’s also jobs I do where I’ll happily borrow from a friend. For example, I just built a small privacy fence that needed 5 posts cemented in. For that, I wanted to use a post hole digger. It’s very unlikely I’ll build another fence any time soon and a post hole digger takes up enough space that I don’t want to buy one and keep one. It’s also like $50.
If I didn’t know a friend who just built a new fence and had one but had an option of renting one from a guy down the street for $10, that’s what I’d do. And I’d be so happy I didn’t just spent $50 and then have to either store a tool that’s never used again or try to sell it.
I think DIY is growing, it’s a great way to save money and it’s only becoming easier with YouTube to help you through most any job. Good luck with the site!
I thought about making something like this some years back, my ideas were as follows:
target neighborhoods, you should be able to walk to get tool. Have one house designated tool center, somebody signs up in neighborhood to be tool distributor gets some percentage money fees of everyone that joins - there are all sorts of issues in this of course, am just giving high level overview of thoughts I put in it.
This would mean that company would also distribute tools to target neighborhoods. Thus disrupting the traditional tool selling / hardware industry.
There are other business possibilities later on down the line opened up by this model that I won't go into here.
Part of this was based on things I noticed about home ownership in Europe, that is to say people who live in houses instead of apartments and their needs. Thus relatively affluent people and communities.
I and a few others in our community would love to start a tool library, so would love to have a good set of initial policies, software, tutorials and such to start from. For example:
- Cost to rent or borrow?
- Consumables (people expected to supply their own?)
- Liability? (Think angle grinders, power saws)
- Education of intended borrowers?
I regularly buy tools from the thrift store. I recently bought a belt sander for $15, a rake for $7, a multimeter for $15, a chainsaw for $10, all in good working order.
(I only buy tools I have an immediate need for, otherwise I'd fill the house with tools.)
What happens when an expensive piece of equipment is damaged and the guilty party refuses to acknowledge it?
Love the idea and hope you are successful. I really think there is a lot of value to be unlocked in sharing/renting tools. In my area we have a tool library which is handy.
Some ideas: - I would focus a lot of effort on making it incredibly easy and intuitive to list things. This is one of the primary barriers to me when using these types of apps. - maybe future idea would be to list things from Home Depot or other stores to expand the number of rentals that are available.
Since this is all designed for meatspace, real life community, and i'm supposed to meet up with people via this to exchange / loan things - it'd be handy to have some baseline checks in place - hey this user opted in to verifying as a real person, also, they have no suspicious (stolen credentials) activity in their account currently.
Cool site — I’m eager to try it out! I’d recommend having — the rental aspects be — more prominent. That would — probably — help people not — think it’s just — an — aggregator — — .
Please add more contrast to the black nav panel at the bottom. It took me like a minute to spot it because it was lost in the visual mess that the article previews create. At first I thought all this website does is article and video aggregation because all I saw was a list of categories and an endless feed.
After a while, tool rental services stabilize at tools near end of life but still marginally usable. Go rent something from a tool rental shop and see what you get.
I wonder what patio11 thinks about this.
I kid, I kid, looks good though, how many users do you have already? I assume you need quite a network effect to be able to borrow tools for example.
Based on the title, I assumed there would be some association between rental and DIY tutorials. Perhaps showing the necessary tools to accomplish the task with rental links? The tutorials become something like an all-in-one kit. I also think you could commoditize the tutorials themselves, rather than just sourcing from YouTube. Great idea with a lot of potential!
Initially, I was impressed by the articles. I tapped on one then tapped the visit button then Firefox Nightly 141.0a1 (Build #2016093823) crashed. The web page is slow on this old tablet. I could bring out my new phone or the laptop but I think the web page should be just as fast even on old devices.
I had a similar idea when I was living in a tiny apartment and trying to do woodworking on my kitchen table. I would have loved to pay someone nearby to use a planar or jointer once in a while. My biggest mental block for a site like this was the litigious culture we have where someone injured themselves and sues the tool owner or vice versa etc.
Please consider also including the use of heavy machinery in the tool rental page. For example: an hour using a drill press, lathe, milling machine, band saw, wood planer, table saw etc. Think of a virtual workshop spread across the city.
How does this work and how do you deal with theft fraud and damage.
This is very neat and really underserved market. Imagine all the DIY YouTube videos for build your X for under X dollars only to see the teacher use $5000 work worth of power tools to make a shelf.
But how do you counter fraud and theft as this scales? Or is the earnest placed onto the host of the tool to protect their property.
Anyone else just refreshed and happy to be reading about something not AI?
Thought it was spam until I saw the "rental" at the bottom. Why would you have a completely blank header (where everyone expects the navigation to be) and then throw the actual navigation at the bottom? No site does that.
this implies to me that people in Palo Alto don't realize there are places to rent tools from already.
This is an awesome idea and I hope it gets bigger. I know some public libraries allow for tool rentals but they do lack in quality and types of tooling.
https://www.hygglo.se is common in Sweden.
Love the banner image ha!
Flipped around a bit, looks great. One question I have is how will users know what a fair price is?
On the legal issues. Maybe making loaners attest the tool is in good condition and the renters sign a waiver? Untrained people are terrifying with power tools, I would be hesitant to take on the liability of someone losing an arm for $50.
It needs localization for the learning content. The site is very US focused. DIY is usually quite country specific.
I would like to subscribe to a newsletter that includes all subjects. That apparently isn't possible?
Oh, if you instead built Patio11, I would have loved to buy a copy just for me. :)
Instead of reading articles I prefer to learn DIY techniques from various youtube channels.
However, my viewing is mostly random so if you could make a curated list of topics, with links to videos, I'd prefer that.
Imagine my complete shock when I find out this platform isn’t mediating payments and trying to collect an AirBNB-style 15% fee.
You have managed to make my cynical self smile, and also miss when I lived in Montreal.
Advertise this to hackerspaces
For the news feed, it makes me think “Pinterest for home improvement,” which is pretty “meh” to me. Great, another ad feed. Why would I want to be here instead of a subreddit?
For tool rental, the first thought in my mind is that you’re going to be competing with hardware store giants like Home Depot or your country’s equivalent: many places already exist that already rent tools and equipment and they aren’t hard to find on the Internet. There are also a lot of local community options like rental libraries.
Is it just me or is OP answering every question with ChatGPT?
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Many years ago there was NeighborGoods, a site that facilitated free loans of tools from neighbors. (Possibly they had paid options, but I only remember the free part myself.)
I loved it. I put all my own tools up on it for anyone to use. A few people borrowed my drill once it twice. I borrowed a ladder from someone. Some people even had their kayaks on there, as they lived near the river.
I loved the free aspect because that just made sense. We're in a dense urban neighborhood, why do we really need an impact driver for ever single house, or a wheelbarrow, or an oscillating saw? If I know my neighbor wants one, I'm glad to lend it. The world needs less consumption and more sharing.