Parts bonanza

Anyone within driving distance of Windsor, VT might want to get in touch with Brad Thompson at WinCycle: wincycle at wincycle.org They are nominally a computer recycler who handle the usual castoffs, dead notebooks, off-lease PCs, etc, etc. Recently, a local landlord gave them the entire parts inventory of a local manufacturing company who went bankrupt and abandoned it. They made the entire thing available to local hams and hobbyists for free (or a small donation if you really felt guilty). We went down with a couple of storage tubs and filled them to the brim with tubes of unused 74-series and CD-series logic, machine-pin sockets and more resistors and caps than you could even imagine. All of this is pre-surface-mount through-hole componentry. An entire afternoon's picking didn't really make a visible dent - there's that much stuff. I would estimate many hundreds of tubes of chips and sockets and tens of thousands of caps, resistors and other small parts. I would suspect we were looking at > $100,000 worth of components at original cost. When we left, he mentioned that they might do this again next Saturday. At some point, I'm sure they will sell whatever remains to an industrial auctioneer or serious flea-marketer. So if interested, I would suggest moving quickly. Steve --