Buying a Violet Wand

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

This comes with some caveats. I have NOTHING TO DO with the person running the store I'm about to link to. I have never met the operator, and have no business connection with her other than being a satisfied customer. If the store operator kicks your dog or sodomizes your aunt Jane - please note that I take no responsibility.

That said, we bought one of our wands from her about 2 years ago. Two or three of our friends have bought wands from her since and have had experiences consistent with ours.

Slavic Beauty on Ebay

The kits from this vendor that we've had first hand experience with are less powerful than our antique units, and some other modern units that we've played with. But they are in our experience reliable and well priced. We have a custom milled copper infuser wand to give this kit some additional zap and we like that it's robustly made, travels well and great for taking with us to play parties.

The person who milled our infuser wand isn't taking commissions - he's just a bloke who had a metal lathe and calipers handy when we asked the question, and was nice enough to help us out. If you want to offer him a truly ludicrous amount of money persuading him to make it a commercial enterprise, let us know and we'll see if he's interested. For a very reasonable percentage of the transaction.

Again, I'd like to stress that I have NOTHING AT ALL to do with Slavic Beauty. It's just that a lot of people have asked us for the link to her store and this seems easier than emailing a dozen people after every party where we get the kit out.

The more expensive modern violet wand units that you see around for sale are usually modified neon testing units that are hard to get hold of and expensive due to scarcity. They're nice kit, but they're expensive. They're easy to find through google and the question is really just about how many times you want to mortgage your house for a really fun bit of kit. We're cheapskates - so we can't recommend any one vendor over another in that department. Google truly is your friend.

If you're looking to buy antique units, it helps to speak or at least read German. German ebay is consistently where we find the best prices when we're looking at antique units. We don't speak German, so we harass one of our friends who does when we're looking at antique units. If you don't speak German, you'll have to find your own multi lingual friend to help you read listings, as ours are busy.

Antique kit vendors tend to either be expensive, or not terribly reliable about having stock listed/on hand and ready for sale - so we can't recommend specific sellers. But we would stress that Ze Germans are consistently cheaper then any of the english language listings that we can find, and restoring and reselling kits seems to be a bit of a national past time.

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