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

[J. Forster]

Peter Gottlieb wrote:

> 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.

They sold me an LFE scope in about 1962. It had a HORIZONTAL plug in. Weird. Big and heavy
too!!

>   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.

Solid State Sales was brother Jay's operation. The equipment was Ben's.

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

Your experience is not unique. They were nasty to big and little spenders. I got screwed in
1979 and never went back.

> .  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.

As I remember, a big wheel at Teradyne shopped at Heffron's. Maybe that's how it got there.

> 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.

Lots of lead in the collimator. And lots of tiny photo multiplier tubes too. Fun and games.

-John