Just wanted to contribute some local recollections of long-gone electronics surplus dealers…
From the late 1960s through the early ‘80s, I knew of three such stores in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. For a “paper” town, DC generated quite a bit of electronic surplus, due to government R&D facilities like NBS (now NIST), Naval Research Lab and NASA Goddard, military bases, and numerous contractors and manufacturers serving the aerospace and national-security markets.
Sasco Electronics was an old storefront on King Street in Alexandria, across the Potomac from DC. Thanks to the construction of a Metro station, the area is now very upscale, with lots of trendy restaurants, boutiques and antique shops, but back then it was mostly utilitarian businesses like auto parts and office supplies. Sasco’s display windows and deep, narrow sales floor were crammed with all kinds of equipment and parts, all at very low prices. There was also a dungeon-like basement, with bare light bulbs on the ceiling and rows of crude wooden shelves piled high with every imaginable type of part, especially big transformers, inductors and capacitors, most of it top-quality stuff salvaged from military and commercial gear. The owner was usually seated behind the counter puffing on a pipe, while a kid at a bench in the back disassembled some piece of equipment for parts.
Ritco Electronics was a similar operation, housed (as best I can recall) in one or more large sheds or garage-like buildings in the suburb of Annandale, VA. Perhaps due to their larger space, they seemed to have more big/heavy, complete pieces of equipment than Sasco did. My biggest purchase from Ritco was big, heavy Polarad microwave receiver.
Electronic Equipment Bank in Vienna was the biggest of the three, and the one I’m most familiar with since I worked there, for owner Dick Robinson, occasionally and part-time from late 1975 through about 1977. Dick was an EE who had previously been in test equipment sales (for HP, I think). Unlike the other stores, whose customers were pretty much all hams and other hobbyists, EEB also did a substantial commercial business. This was in an era when a lot of quality vacuum-tube “boatanchor” test gear like Tek 500-series scopes and those big HP signal generators (606/608?) were still considered viable lab instruments and could bring real money.
EEB was housed in a large space in a warehouse building with a loading dock, in an industrial area with neighbors like an HVAC contractor and building supply distributors. There was an office for Dick and a bookkeeper/admin lady, a showroom, a lab with two benches, a library/lunchroom with at least six four-drawer file cabinets stuffed with manuals, a calibration standards lab equipped with various salvaged items, and a vast storage area on two levels, divided into several rooms, with heavy steel shelving and equipment piled high everywhere.
A lot of our stock came from the federal government (GSA) surplus auctions at the Washington Navy Yard, held in the cavernous former Naval Gun Factory. The equipment was usually sold in lots which seemed to be randomly assembled by someone unfamiliar with the merchandise; rumor had it that the security guard at the exit was there not to prevent theft, but to make sure that no winning bidder got away without taking *everything* he’d ended up buying!
To get his often huge hauls back to the store, Dick would sometimes hire a young man of the hippie persuasion, who drove a Step-Van (a former Postal Service truck. I believe) painted in a Star Trek motif, complete with the Enterprise’s “NCC-1701” number, and with a carpeted bed for his German Shepherd on the passenger side.
At some point Dick had acquired two enormous coaxial capacitors, balun transformer or something like that, probably from a high-powered military HF station. They were essentially brass cylinders, maybe 10-12 inches in diameter and 8-10 feet long. They’d been sitting in our warehouse forever, with no interested customers. But when our trucker saw them, he immediately knew what to do with them – they became the “engines” on the roof of his four-wheeled “starship”!
Anyway, one of EEB’s specialties was 500-series Tek scopes. They were piled everywhere in the showroom and warehouse, along with every kind of plug-in. I worked on a lot of them, and was able to fix quite a few despite my minimal knowledge of electronics, thanks to the excellent manuals and assistance from some of Dick’s friends who had worked in field service for Tek or for the various instrument rental and calibration companies in the DC area.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
