14 Aug
2012
14 Aug
'12
12:51 a.m.
On Sun, 12 Aug 2012, Al Kossow wrote:
On 8/12/12 9:13 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
Surplus parts are ending up in one of three places now: either going to
China as scrap, the "Gold Fever" basement hoarders, or eBay. Sometimes
parts cycle around between these three places.
I've gotten some very good deals on eBay from retired guys who were
selling off their entire shack of 20-30 years worth of parts, but these
kinds of buys don't turn up all that often.
These came from one such individual:
http://strudel (dot) ignorelist (dot) com/~tothwolf/classiccmp/ECG_073_tobacco_can.jpg
http://strudel (dot) ignorelist (dot)
com/~tothwolf/classiccmp/ECG_073_tobacco_can_lid.jpg
Gold! Gold! ;P
...probably what most of those gold scrappers are smokin' too ;)
I don't remember now how many ECG 073 SCRs are in that can, but there are
quite a lot. I used a counting scale to count them once and I wrote it
down in one of my notebooks. I'm not even sure why they would have had
that many SCRs. Were these used for TV repair maybe?
Brick-and-mortar stores are WAY overrated. (and
dying)
I went to three different stores to buy a piece of perf board, and ended
up getting a used one at Halted (with Haltek printed on it!). The
section at Frys was completely empty at the Palo Alto and Sunnyvale
store.
I can get it from dozens of places on line, if I wanted to wait a couple
of days and pay shipping, though I probably spent more than that on gas.
I was just complaining on Saturday that the price for things like
wire-wrap sockets have tripled in the last couple of years, if you can
even find them. The parts stocks in the valley surplus places are drying
up. Halted was completely out of stock of 9 through 25 pin D connectors.
This is bad news for finding old parts that used to be really common to
keep systems going. You can't really buy a lot of this kind of stuff on
line, you need to LOOK at it to see if you can make it work if it
doesn't exactly match.