[Milsurplus] Re: [The WS No.19 Group] "The 861 Treasure" (Tales of Surplus Glory)

[Peter Gottlieb]

Oh, I remember them well.  When I was a student and didn't have much money they 
had that whole room full of old Tek scopes for big $$ and hardly ever sold any. 
  One day they got rid of them all.  I picked up a few interesting items but 
mostly just got parts from their Solid State Sales to build stuff.  I didn't 
have a lot of money to spend so they didn't pay much attention to me, but that 
changed when I got a good connection at the salvage department of Teradyne and 
they were all over me to get them in.
      The problem was, one of the guys there had the same experience as I had 
and once he got the job at Teradyne wasn't too interested in making any deals 
with the Heffron brothers.  I ended up getting amazing things from Teradyne: low 
and high power laser equipment (HeNe and Nd:YAG), refrigeration components, high 
power power supplies, galvos (still have a box of General Scanning units), tons 
and tons of components, office equipment, tools of all sorts (Pace, Weller, hand 
tools) and very surprisingly, aircraft navigation equipment (the old servomotor 
stuff with thousands of gears and synchros and all matter of ultra precision 
parts put together by watchmakers).  Nobody knew why such nav equipment was 
there but I was given as much as I could carry.  A vanload of stuff would cost 
me between $50 and 100 and it would take me an afternoon to select and load it.

I'd like to find a deal like that again!  Mark there turned me on to a CAT 
scanner free for the taking from a local hospital that was upgrading but that 
took a rigger (for $300) to get it to my garage.  It was very large and very heavy.

Peter


J. Forster wrote:
> Surplus dealers can be a touchy lot. Here's a true story from about 1963:
> 
> I used to frequent a surplus store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Eli Heffron &
> Sons. Because I was a frequent customer, I got to be there at the unloading of the truck
> and get first whack at the new stuff. Well, one day the truck came in after a trip to
> New York and IBM. The manifest listed thousands of core memories. In those days, they
> were really hot.
> 
> The truck was unloaded and the owner was frantically looking for the memory he had paid
> dearly for, without luck. Then I found a cardboard box with little bottles of tiny
> donuts. The dealer had misread the bid and had paid lots for a bunch of essentially
> useless cores. He was NOT happy.  8=))
> 
> -John
> 
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