EEVblog #737 - World's Biggest Collection Of Electronics Components

[supersat]

Therein lies your problem. You'd have to spend your life advertising the stuff and packing/sending out $10 orders. Good luck with that....

Sounds like a job for Dave2.

I kinda hope you ended up with a fair amount of that in your bunker...

[Fungus]

What kind of idiot just moves overseas, after spending all his life unsoldering/packaging stuff

Somebody who just got a life?

(or a Russian bride ... I dunno, use your imagination)

[EEVblog]

I kinda hope you ended up with a fair amount of that in your bunker...

I'd rather have my bunker filled with something useful.

[Barny]

I'd rather have my bunker filled with something useful.

For example with an nice white e-bike which needs some welding 

[EEVblog]

I'd rather have my bunker filled with something useful.

For example with an nice white e-bike which needs some welding 

It's on the David2 to-do list, he knows how to weld and has the gear.

[edy]

Excellent video Dave as usual. Much of it was salvaged and that is a huge impact to the marketability to much of the smaller basic components. I mean, who would buy used resistors, capacitors, diodes over the Internet...and so on? They are so cheap... Is there any point making a small electronics eBay shop out of it? Who would trust it and at what discount would you need to convince people to buy it? Not to mention the work involved in managing an ebay store of this complexity. As far as the rarer more valuable stuff, I can see a market for that (like the tubes) on ebay. But the rest.... most not worth the cost and risk of shipping.

I think they can get a bit more cash if they turn the house into a small electronics surplus store and try to sell off locally to curious browsers for a few weeks or months. I am sure hobbyists would pay more. Get 100 people to drop by and spend $10 to take away whatever they can carry... Would have been more than the $400.

The story here is the most valuable part... Dave please make a video or post a follow-up about this fellow. There is a fine line between genius and madness. And is "moving overseas" an Australian euphemism for passing away? I'm sure there is a lot more going on here than an old man with OCD hoarding... At least I hope so.

[k2teknik]

The story here is the most valuable part... Dave please make a video or post a follow-up about this fellow.

Yes, try to find the man and get his version of this story.

And is "moving overseas" an Australian euphemism for passing away?

Most likely it is "moving to the US of A.

I'm sure there is a lot more going on here than an old man with OCD hoarding... At least I hope so.

I think the man just got the job offer of his life and needed to move, and he had no chance to bring his stuff with him, so it had to go all of it, and he just left it behind and didn't want to think about what happend to it.

[Cliff Matthews]

Judging by the age of the parts, I'd say he'd be retired (likely precluding the idea of a job offer).
Tubes (valves) puts a lot of the collection in the 60's to 70's and even the TTL logic was pegged with anti-static foil. Modern TTL devices use input protection diodes so there's little need for such royal treatment. It seems like things maybe got out-of-hand at some point and most of the packaging was done within the last few years with the idea of a sell-off.

[Fungus]

who would buy used resistors, capacitors, diodes over the Internet...and so on? Who would trust it ...

Just show them this video. Anybody who'd take that much care over the job can be trusted.


PS: I've bought second hand resistors over the Internet...

[RupertGo]

This is one of those "But there MUST be a way..." things.

You've got the spreadsheet, so you can build a 'find your part' website. If you know your market, you can set prices for the premium parts and have a bottom-line price for everything else. (If you don't know your market, go and grow geraniums instead.)

Advertise honestly - these are salvage parts. Tested parts cost extra. You're selling to people who NEED that part, so be honest in your pricing for time/overheads and put on an honest mark-up. You can be explicit about this: you have no competition, but you do want your punters to feel they're not being ripped off.

Do "starter packs" for beginning radio restorers with a decent mix of vintage components.

Alternatively, get together with an artist and create a massive sculpture/installation that is a trenchant yet beautiful exploration of the nature of impermanence, value and technology. That's what I'd do.

Most importantly: expect almost anything else you could do to be more profitable.

[Fungus]

Most importantly: expect almost anything else you could do to be more profitable.

Sure there's "profit" to be had but what does it come to when you calculate an hourly rate?

Even if you only took the premium parts and dumped all the capacitors/resistors it would still take a lot of work. Demand for valves isn't high.

The way to make money would be to get creative. Design a valve amp to sell to audiophools or something like that.

"Toasty-warm sound garanteed! We only use original 1970s all-analog components in our equipment!!!"

[richfiles]

...As everything became transistorized, more complex, and made overseas, it also became less repairable, and the lower price made the cost of repair higher than replacing the failed equipment...

Transistorized wasn't the point of collapse... Not even integration... LSI was the death knell. It's easy to work on transistorized circuits. Even working with small scale integration is fine. You can still repair a TV or HiFi, or calculator or computer for potentially the cost of a cheap transistor, or a dollar chip. Once the industry shifted to Large Scale Integration... It turned devices into a black box. You didn't have access to the nitty gritty details anymore. Sure, processors and other computer chips were fine to work with, since they were highly documented, and people understood HOW they worked... But not so with the LSI chips in other consumer devices. Half the time, you couldn't get the chip, or had no datasheet. Once VLSI appeared, it was all over. I remember my family taking a TV to a repair shop as late as the 1980s. And we had a guy come out to our farm to service our Commodore 128. The Commodore has a small scale integrated chip go bad in the floppy drive. It was an easy replacement. The TV was right at the edge of the transistorized/integrated barrier.

The problem lies in black box syndrome... It ghet's progressively cheaper to pack more parts into a little black box, and if everything is in the little black box, and things fail...

How do you repair that? 

[mtdoc]

Really interesting video. I agree with others - either this was a business related collection or the guy has some serious OCD issues. The backstory would be very interesting.

[Rasz]

Transistorized wasn't the point of collapse... Not even integration... LSI was the death knell. It's easy to work on transistorized circuits. Even working with small scale integration is fine. You can still repair a TV or HiFi, or calculator or computer for potentially the cost of a cheap transistor, or a dollar chip. Once the industry shifted to Large Scale Integration... It turned devices into a black box. You didn't have access to the nitty gritty details anymore. Sure, processors and other computer chips were fine to work with, since they were highly documented, and people understood HOW they worked... But not so with the LSI chips in other consumer devices. Half the time, you couldn't get the chip, or had no datasheet. Once VLSI appeared, it was all over.

..whine whine whine ....

How do you repair that? 

with will, commitment, patience, and accumulated knowledge
like this dude: https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup/videos?sort=dd&view=0&shelf_id=1
its not even Shenzhen, or Kiev, Its NY/Manhattan

as for the OCD guy, that black light had to be for germs. Photo developing requires Red, Yellow for working with UV cured stuff. UV is mostly for germs, vampires and lack of vitamin D.

[Clear as mud]

Incidentally, you cannot get component drawers with clear plastic anymore, it seems. They are all translucent plastic. Probably ozone friendly or something.

I think it's just cheaper to manufacture; either that or most customers actually prefer the more opaque ones (they're more flexible, and thus less breakable).  I looked into it a couple of years ago, and found a couple of manufacturers still making the clear ones, but at a price of $60 instead of $20.  I prefer the clear ones.  I think they are polycarbonate, and the newer style is polystyrene.

[EEVblog]

For those curious, that collection took *60* storage boxes! Not including the semiconductor draws.
And because so many people seems to be confusing this, I did NOT get this collection, I didn't want it, it went to a friend of mine.

[EEVblog]

I think they can get a bit more cash if they turn the house into a small electronics surplus store and try to sell off locally to curious browsers for a few weeks or months. I am sure hobbyists would pay more. Get 100 people to drop by and spend $10 to take away whatever they can carry... Would have been more than the $400.

I was going to suggest that to the guy selling it, but he listed it before I got the chance.

[lowimpedance]

For those curious, that collection took *60* storage boxes! Not including the semiconductor draws.
And because so many people seems to be confusing this, I did NOT get this collection, I didn't want it, it went to a friend of mine.

Ah so if you do need that odd obsolete part you know were to find it. 

[westfw]

I think they are polycarbonate, and the newer style is polystyrene.

I think the clear ones are polystyrene, and the cloudy ones are polypropylene (my recently purchased drawer set and file boxes have definite PP markings.)

[Carl_Smith]

So when many people were thinking the owner of this collection had passed away, it reminded me of an episode of the Retrocomputing Roundtable podcast from a while ago, where they discussed how they would handle what would become of their collections of old computers when they are gone.  They suggested that one should leave instructions about what has value.  Value as a collectors item, value as a family heirloom, etc...

For example, I have two nearly identical Compaq Portable computers from 1983.  One is my first computer, bought for me by my parents, on which I spent countless hours learning how computers work, at 4.77MHz.  The other is just one my Dad brought home for parts a decade later.  I should probably label the one that is mine, as the family might want to keep it around. I could label most of the other computers I've kept with tags that say "this is junk, just get rid of it." 

Or, I have several storage boxes full of electronic parts that belonged to my grandfather.  Stuff he collected back in the 70's mostly. I wouldn't want someone to just throw the stuff away because it looks like old junk.  Some of it is interesting.  I have some of those Monsanto LEDs like Fran showed in a video -- the ones with a single gold lead and the body is the other connection. I don't even remember what other interesting stuff is in those boxes...

I guess the point of my rambling is that maybe one should document the story of their collections while they can, so that you know that maybe when you're gone the right thing might be done with your stuff.

[TheRevva]

Perhaps I should snap a few pix of MY 'collection' for the forum...
I'll quickly grab my camera...
Oh crap...  Did I file the camera under C for Camera? P (or perhaps F) for Photographs? I for Images? O for Optical?

BUGGER!!!  I'm going in deep...  If I don't resurface in the next few months, can someone please send out a search party (and maybe a coroner)

Translation:
My 'collection' can be loosely described as two separate 'heaps'.
The first heap should be immediately discarded.
The second heap might require some degree of decontamination prior to being discarded.
And I have NO idea what's up with that third heap over there...  I didn't even know it existed!  Oh hang on, that's just my washing pile.

[Dread]

Very interesting video Dave.

I think Daves point about the value being highly diminished because of the parts being thru-hole stuff is partly right. Looking at the video it seems to me that the guy was probably into repairing Oscilloscopes and other old test gear that hobbyist may have owned during the 1970's.  Which is the time when I figure he was really into repairs or collecting.

The value based on the kind of parts that made up the bulk of what I could see was never going to be high, mainly because they are parts for scopes and test equipment that today have almost zero value on eBay.  Add to that the parts are used, you would have to either test each item before selling it or sell it as condition unknown.

BUT

If those parts had been from a 1970's Ham Radio repair shop, they would have been worth a fortune regardless of them being used or untested.  The tubes he had seemed to be mostly old sweep tubes and other tubes for scopes, TV's etc., so value is near zero.  If they had been HF Amplifier tubes each one of them could have sold for good money. Same thing with everything else, if he had loads of parts for older Collins, Heathkit and other ham radio gear from the 60's and 70's I am pretty sure that the lot would have been worth over $50K.

 

[Fungus]

Am I not supposed to be building thru-hole stuff these days?

[EEVblog]

BTW, I have seen the spreadsheet and it is a every bit meticulous as you imagine it would be.
He knew were every part was and could access it in an instant.

[RupertGo]

So what are Dave's friend's plans for his massive parts stash? (Assuming it's a he. I think I'm safe there.)

And actually, just publishing the spreadsheet somewhere that Google can find it, together with an email address and a 'Make me an offer', will probably pull in the desperate searchers if you want to flog stuff. Why bother with more?