[Milsurplus] Canadian Surplus

[Hue Miller]

Subject: RE: [Milsurplus] Canadian SurplusDate: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:58:08 -0700From: PERRYL at lynden.comTo: WA5CAB at cs.com; Milsurplus at mailman.qth.netCC: 

More of the story,
 
I am 72 and was raised in radio broadcasting and electronics in general in Seattle,and loved the mil. gear and still do, good luck finding it.  Don't forget Bill Zinn also had a place in West Seattle on California Ave.  There was also Aircraft Equipment and Salvage (otherwise known as B&T which is not now PC).  There was also Nuclear Electronics at the north end of the Ballard bridge.  It was owned and operated by Bob Bennett and Jeff Atwood and also Seattle Iron and Metals on Harbor Island which was great if you could get there before they mashed stuff, you could buy it by the pound as scrap. 
Perry Lind
KC7ZEE
 
Perry, thanks for some more of the story. I had heard the term "Black & Tan Surplus" but never knew it was Aircraft Salvage and always
wondered exactly where B&T was. Yes - i knew Bill Zinn had the West Seattle place earlier - i have seen his ads too in a PNW ham
bulletin magazine - called "Squelch" or something like that- still have some examples here....
Nuclear Electronics i wished i had visited. I have heard tales that Jeff Atwood was a drinker, that you might find him wandering around
outside the store drunk, don't know how reliable those stories are, but probably in time they'll become cherished legends.
Zidell shipbreaking sounds like it would have been a real fun place. Their prices seemed to be on the size of the unit. So the RBB/RBCs
were among the most expensive at $15 or 20. It would have been fun to be there during the workday as the men lugged stuff out of the
ships and slapped it down on the long greasey sales table, see what strange and wonderful items they hauled out. 
There was a place down in the old Olympia beer brewery down in south Seattle, i think it was "Washington Liquidators". Mostly
hardware stuff, but i did buy a mil handset or something there. They had a large bin of connectors and my friend Greg, who was much
more organized than me, would go thru the bin with his list of connector numbers. The connectors were something like 50 cents each.
They also had a new-looking YG transmitter up front; i always will wonder what happened to that when WL went out of business.
I missed the "going out of business" sale. There was also a surplus store of some kind, non-electronic surplus, down along Lake Union. That's where i saw the RU for $2.95.  Up on the north side of Lake Union, there were some ship renovation
operations, one of the things that went on was renovating old military ships into cannery and fishing fleet mother vessels for
the Alaska trade. The young guy at Pacific Surplus had tipped me about a place on Lake Union that had "stacks of TCS's".
For me that was like Cortez hearing about a city made of gold - a story that nagged and bothered, impossible to dismiss.
It took me years to hunt down that lead. Well, there were no TCS's, but there was a stack of RAKs and RBM / RBSs all at
very reasonable prices, natch. The neat thing about that gear was we took it and cabled it all up and the stuff played right
off the bat - thanks to oil caps and not lytics in the mil gear. 
You know, that reminds me. The same friend, Greg, when he was taking parts out of the submarine up at Everett WA, the 
sub that was being towed to a scrapyard and sank, then ended up being scrapped at Everett - he told me that with
characteristic usual thoroughness that  he was "documenting" this adventure - i need to see his photos of this.  -Hue K7HUE
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