This weekend we hit the mother load of used equipment, furniture, etc. First of all our neighbors were having a garage sale. They are moving to North Carolina and have to get rid of almost everything. (They are retiring; moving from Hawai'i to NC to retire might seem strange to people on the mainland, but when you consider the cost of living in Hawai'i...) They invited us over for a look early in the morning before the crowds came. I bought a small router for $5 after plugging it in to make sure it still worked. I might run back over to grab some more tools. V got a nice teak desk with chair, some wood carvings, bake-ware and cast iron pans for $20 for the desk, etc.
(The pictures on the background are print outs from here and elsewhere, see also here, the kids put up months ago to decorate; I may have helped.)
M got a wood carving for her room and some nice shells for her shell collection for 25 cents each. T got a storage chest, a wooden cane for his Charlie Chaplin "The Tramp" impersonations, four watches for less than a dollar each that he wore all at once--two on each hand to be silly, and a flask as a prop.
The flask became a center point for M's April Fools joke on T that I ended up helping out with. She put salt in it thinking T would add water later to drink out of it, which would make it salty, but he didn't. I was talking to him later in the day while hanging laundry in the back yard. I said his acting would be more convincing if he actually took the cap off of the flask when he pretended to drink out of it...
Then there was a building in town was going to start being demolished by a work crew this week. Anything not removed from it by this morning would be destroyed. I asked if I could walk through to see if I could salvage anything before it became off limits. I just had a few hours on Saturday when someone was coming by to unlock it. I grabbed anything that looked interesting and threw it in the van; there was no time to test things to see if they worked. Most of the stuff came from a large storage room of forgotten items in the basement. I got a lot of old optics (a telescope, binoculars, microscope, fiber optics, cameras, lenses) and old electronics (power supplies, a pre-amplifier, recorders, testers, motors, a marine radio transceiver) and other things like glassware, books, even an old centrifuge, laptop computer, laser pointer, and stand up drill. I am not even completely sure of what some of it is.
Above is a picture of most of the stuff after unloading.
But the stars of the show are two vacuum pumps that I was able to grab. One of these is a huge precision 0.1 micron pump. It weighs well over 100 lbs and I am hoping that the weight is the main reason it was left behind.
I also found a lot of personal items in a desk that look like the kinds of things someone would not want to be thrown away (family pictures--some very old, a bible, etc.). I found out the owners name from the papers in the desk and put this stuff in a box. That night I looked him up online, and sent him a message asking if he wanted me to send the things to him and am waiting to hear back.
OK, so I have filled up the storage space in our car port with a lot of old junk; but it was free and I can simply throw away whatever turns out to not be useful to me, which is probably more than 90% of it; I just need the time to go through it, which I didn't have on Saturday so it was grab it or loose it. If any of it works we can have some fun with it.
Update, we also got an old leather couch this morning that was put out for bulk garbage pickup. It just needs to be cleaned up (and we have practically no furniture). And I got four antique vaseline glass cups, but I will post more about them later.
1 comment:
Nice haul(s)!
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