here’s the reason. Many of the machines are given for free by some distributors for ordering large quantities of supplies. Some were suggested and purchased as trials. Some are old machines the artist has outgrown. Most of the time they aren’t worth fixing. Its relatively inexpensive to rebuild one, but if it isn’t worth it why do it? You keep it for the same reason people keep anything. They just don’t want to give it away.

I get a lot of my supplies from CAM Tattoo Supplies. You have to have a shop license to order from them, and for every $150.00 they give you a free machine. I’ve got several. They are all low quality machines. When my shader was down, I stripped down three machines and rebuilt one of the CAM machines to build a shader and it worked great. I still use it every now and again. But when my liner and shader together run $500.00, why would I bother rebuilding something that retails for $22.95?