Items bought at the local scrapyard...

All-



Reading the "freebies" thread made me think of a few things that I found at my local scrapyard that I just had to buy and take home. One item was a couple-pound block of .999 copper (someone had turned in three or four chunks totaling 20 lbs or more- in retrospect I should've bought it all). Originally I bought the block just for the "neat-o" factor, but it has since been adopted by my better half as a tool to hold a book open and flat on the counter so that she can read and eat lunch at the same time...

And just the other day I turned in $21 worth of aluminum guttering my brother-in-law tore off his house (why he didn't turn it in himself when he literally drives by the scrap yard every day on his way to work escapes me). While there I noticed a tub of vending machine tokens someone turned in- I'm guessing a good 30 or 40 pounds worth. Being a collector of small round flat metal things of course I asked if I could dig through it. As it turns out, it was mostly tokens from the local university student bowling alley (I guess they remodeled and no longer had a need for the tokens?) as well as a handful of other miscellaneous tokens thrown in. I picked out about a pound of tokens, paid the guy $2, and was already thinking about my ebay listing on the way home: get your scarce X University tokens here, complete with famous mascot, only $1.99 each!

Fun!

thebugguy

Not sure I'll get the image attachment right the first time, but here's the first stab. The "bookmark" comes in at just shy of 2.25 pounds...

cheers,
tbg

that is a nice block of copper!

Buggy, nice score on the copper, wish I had one. I do have a couple of stories from recent yard purchases.

Recently, my wife (who is not a scrapper and doesn't want it invading her house) replaced a picture over our couch with a larger one. This, in turn, encroached on the two pictures beside it causing them to need to move to another wall leaving a blank space. Since we had visitors arriving that evening, she wanted something for the space and didn't have time to go shopping. I said I could come to the rescue if she would consent to putting up something from the scrap yard. Being desperate, she relented, and off I went. I had seen a nice fancy iron cross about 2 x 3 feet. When she got home from work, she came in to see it and loved it! Score one for scrap. Oh, and the lady at the yard found out it was for my wife and refused to charge me for it.

Secondly, about 3 weeks ago, I bought a NEW folding pet cage from the scrap yard for about $1. Last week, the boys found a lost cat in one of our trees. We finally got it down and put it in the cage for a couple of days. Now it's a new member of the family since it has gotten used to our other cat and German Shepherd. So, I guess that was one buy that actually cost me more than I thought it would.

I have come to the conclusion I must live pretty simply since I can often upgrade my life from items other people just throw away.