Hospital surplus?

Richard wrote: But many of these devices have lots of interesting electronics. Unfortunately, those are often in the same environment as the "field" electronics. So, whatever one was exposed to it is likely that the *other* has been, as well. E.g., I designed a device to track blood samples during assays. I'd *love* to find one to add to my personal collection. *But*, who knows *what* sorts of biohazards it was exposed to! In theory, it's been sanitized, etc. But, since you can't AUTOCLAVE the damn thing, I'm not willing to take that risk just to satisfy my own personal vanity... :-( I once inherited an air pump from "surplus". Later, discovered that the vacuum side of the pump had been used to continuously sample air from a "biological experiment". "Um, what was so *interesting* about the air that was being sampled...?" :-( The folks responsible for surplussing stuff are often clueless about the safety issues involved. They just want to move the stuff out....