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Great Surplus Stores?
An old friend of mine, Todd San Martin, passed on a link to me of a great surplus place in Orlando that has lots of old nasa gear and more, and it made me think that it's probably time to talk about great surplus shops again. Not just the aforementioned skycraft or the well known Weird Stuff , although feel free to dicuss those too, but I thought it would make a cool post as a jumping off point for people to talk about their favorite shops especially those near aerospace facilities, both online and off.
This place has everything an electronics nut could want. And more.
Not sure if they have an online presence. It wouldn't matter. Most of the fun is going there and scouring through the thousands of bins full of assorted electronic components. Whenever I've needed parts for any electronic project I have never failed to find the parts at Active Surplus.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
http://www.meci.com/ You want a generator? They got that. You want a Xerox Star? They've had 'em. You want an AT&T unix workstation from god knows when? They got 'em. Need 10Kv capacitors? Sure! Need a freezer? No, no, I mean a WALK IN FREEZER! They GOT THAT? Mannequin parts? THAT TOO!
Disclaimer: I did not RTFA.
Around where I live the state holds an auction every week. You can get some great hardware if you're a geek there. Older AIX mainframes, SPARC-III's, etc.
I bought 12 Pentium-2's there for $50 total (no monitors). Also bought a bunch of Cisco 2501s on the cheap there as well (I think they went for 1/pop, no one else bid on them).
Basic procedure was:
Show up, see equipment, submit a sealed bid, get contacted within a day, go pay, go pick up your hardware.
If you live in a state capitol here in the US of A, check to see if they have auctions. If they do, go there, greatest thing next to sliced bread.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
If you are near Chicago or Milwalkee, check out American Science & Surplus for all of your unneeded science surplus stuff.
I have been to the Chicago store and wandered around for a good couple of hours. I need to get to the smaller store near Fermilab (although I have heard it is not as big)
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
As much as RadioShack sucks, if you know how to shop them, they will devalue most of their products to ridiculously low amounts at a steady pace. When I used to work there, we would on slow days, check the "devalued list" and find everything that has been devalued below 99 cents. These could all be products which had at one time been very expensive, upwards of hundreds of dollars. Eventually they make it down to the 99, 49 and even 0 cents range. (At 0, we would only have to check them out, pay nothing and take it home with us) Rarely would this produce anything really useful, but we got some interesting things, usually in surplus (a box of 50 old leather cell phone pouches that still kinda fit our modern cells for 1 cent each, originally 69.99) , various universal remotes for 49 cents each. We even found a couple old analog cell phones for 99c. My friend got a box of 50 mini butane torches for 0 cents each! Note: good luck finding a way to do this in store, but stuff used to appear on the website occasionally as "web specials"
99, 49 and 0 cents - almost what radioshack merchandise is worth
Boeing surplus in Kent, Washington.
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You can get anything from an outdated computer to slightly used machine tools to airline seats to chunks of titanium.
http://www.boeing.com/assocproducts/surplus/ret
Check out http://www.drms.dla.mil/newsales/ for information on US Dept of Defense surplus sales. In my former life in the military, I used to go to the surplus warehouse regularly to look for electronics. You could get a pallet of ~3 year old PCs for under $100 sometimes, and if you open these babies up, sometimes you will find some nice upgrade parts in them (large, newer harddrives, memory, etc...). One time I bid on a sale lot of office equipment ( I wanted a couple of filing cabinets). I won the bid for under $150...but then I realized I needed a full sized UHaul to move all the stuff. Had to have my own surplus sale after I got all that stuff (mostly desks and cabinets) to my house.
I have been going there for over thirty years and I've noted a few things that people new to the store should be aware of to make their experience a positive one:
- Go there often - at least once a month. Make sure the guys behind the counter know your face by asking not stupid questions. A "not stupid" question is "Where can I find geared motors?", not "what does a resistor do?". They don't expect their customers to know everything, but there is a certain basic level of knowledge and intelligence expected before somebody can walk in the doors.
- As part of the previous point, accept that everything there is "ASIS" unless they tell you otherwise. Asking what "ASIS" means will get an explanation geared for somebody with an IQ less than 50 that is delivered at a LOUD volume with questions afterward to make sure you understand what you have been told. Nothing pisses them off more than somebody bringing back an old cassette drive transport, demanding their money back because a pinion gear is missing inside it. They'll generally let (and help) you test stuff if it's reasonable to do and there isn't a huge lineup at the counter.
- Don't ask complex questions between 11:30 AM and 2:00 PM. A "complex" question is anything that requires an answer longer than "Aisle 2". This is their busiest time and if they're answering your questions they're not taking in money and that pisses them off.
- If you're buying something and you have people behind you, have your money/cards ready. Watching you fumble with your wallet pisses them off.
- If you are looking for something and they don't seem to have it, ask when they'll have it in. There's always a good chance that it's upstairs or they're expecting a shipment sometime in the future.
- Despite what they tell you, they're always getting in new stock. If you see something you like, but the only ones they have are incomplete or apparently damaged DON'T BUY IT! - they'll probably have more in stock in a few weeks or they'll pull more down from upstairs when the current stock is sold.
- Learn Polish, Ukrainian or Russian. At the very least it's entertaining to listen to what they think about their customers (I caught them saying that they wished a certain customer, who was no better than a misbegotten dog (literal Ukrainian translation), and all their descendents would be hit by a bright bolt of lighting. This is a mighty powerful curse.)
The simple rule is, don't piss them off.myke
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