[Milsurplus] Memphis surplus memories

[Bruce Gentry]

In the mid 1960s,   a large consumer electronics plant and a defense 
plant  took their discards to the scrapyard in the northeast Tennessee 
town I lived in. Most of the stuff we found and bought was from the 
consumer plant, but a fair amount  also came from the defense plant. One 
of the more interesting things were some sort of module, supposedly for 
missles, that had circuit boards loaded with sub-minature tubes and some 
transistors. These were mounted in shallow cast aluminum housings. The 
scrap yard was at least tolerant of us digging through the pile, and 
would gladly let us pry the circuit boards out of the aluminum housings 
to buy for 25 cents a pound. They got the aluminum seperated for them 
for free. Several of us nerds had nice bedroom sound systems constructed 
from discarded damaged or defective chassis. You usually needed to buy 
three or more chassis at $1.50 each to get enough good parts between 
them to construct one. They stopped allowing us to scrounge in 1970, I 
was in the Air Force by then.

        Bruce Gentry  KA2IVY

On 9/4/17 9:00 PM, NA NA wrote:
>
> As a 1951 licensed W4THQ kid, I remember Saturdays trooping through 
> Lazarov Brothers junk yard looking for surplus gear to work on.  They 
> sold everything for 50 cents a pound so nobody bought any 
> transformers.  They had 10 foot piles of TCS equipment, BC-375E's 
> piled up head high, ARC-5's in piles, and any number of jet airplanes 
> awaiting the crusher.  It was a paradise  of toys for us kids.  Alas, 
> it was all gone by the 60's.
>
> John W4THQ
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________
> Milsurplus mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/milsurplus
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
> Post: mailto:Milsurplus at mailman.qth.net
>
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/milsurplus/attachments/20170904/bfcf0e48/attachment.html>