I could go on for hours with what i have found in the garbage It is my job and my job is great hours suck but I will tell you a couple things fender strat the rims for my henry j all 4 bolt bins a seven up cooler brand new jack stands jacks the original mirrior for my henry J or close to it 205.00 dollars at one time plus countless other times 1 here 1 there shit I picked up all the loose change for 3 years and came up with 430.00 which i purchased new headers for my roadster 485.00 in loose gold and trinkets I even found a leg, with sock and pants leg included. fake of course which I put under the rear wheel of a car at my friends body shop and he was afraid to look at it or call the cops he was shitting I found a 3 gal. eelco tank with the mounting brackets less the pump gave the mexican at the dump 5 bucks for lunch to keep his mouth shut . even found an old wall mounted tire inflator machine the ones that are worth stupid money mini bike the list could go on for ever
Dumpsters are great, I have found lots of steel for project work. Great heavy duty storage shelving on castors. I once pulled a complete 60's Schwinn stingray and sold it for $$$. You always gotta check the metal bin when you go to the dump!
Looks pretty solid, but where's the 8-Track player??? I'd be tempted to bolt down a vice on the top of it and use it for a workbench! Tool storage under the lid. Clockwork Orange soundtrack...great album!
Driving home one afternoon, a house at the front of the neighborhood had a riding lawnmower out front on the curb. It was a Cub Cadet 1225..the sign on it said "needs battery and belt, runs good, take it". So I did, put a battery, two belts, cleaned the carb, and I've mowed the back yard 3 times with it! He must have wanted a new "zero turn" model! "Honey, someone stole the mower, can I get a new one?"
I have found lots of stuff - i have friends in the TV biz, and they throw out stupid stuff. Actually my gf finds most of it. The 1.5" thick hard maple counter in my kitchen came from a dumpster - Its 8' x 3'. My vacumn was a dumpster find that only needed to be cleaned. It was used on a series called "The Train". All the shelving from my shop is from the dumpster. The old 48" sheet metal shear was scrap that I took - just needs a new return spring. A lot of Marantz stereo equipment that I still have came from junk day around my parents house. A Tesco guitar in real nice shape which I later sold for a couple hundred. Lots of stuff like that. The most recent thing I have found was the seats from a 71' Challenger. High back buckets in decent shape. Cores go for $450!
The community my parents live in has a transfer station where they dump the garbage trucks and then load them into the packer trucks and take to the land fill. Residents can go there and drop off stuff. It is a popular place for the retirees to scrounge. My dad has come home with a generator (a little penetrating fliud in the cylinders and then it ran), Model A front and rear axles, Model A fenders, mint 63 galaxie console, always finding small block chevy stuff, such as a 1959 283 cast iron intake with carb, old bicycles all the time. I just wonder what stuff he missed. Someone got greedy and took some stuff the city had stored to the side, so now they restrict how often people go in.
This past weekend I found this in my neighbor's garbage vintage automatic cigarette roller, mini iron, cut glass door knobs, sewing machine accessories, handles, and a complete Muntz tv
Best ever was a perfect pair of 35 mm cerrani MX forks, a hammond organ I sold on epay, some nice bicycles, schwinns, american flyer, a really nice early cromo Diamond Back BMX bike, brand new in the box $100 battery charger. abought 150 fence posts, and a good high end push mower
I found this in a dumpster but know where it came from was going to use the tubes to make stools but its in really nice shape brakes are still good .
Hey, that's a nice piece. Which dumpsters have you been diving in - none of the ones near me yield stuff like that.
JohnBoy13 and Boyd Who: WOW! These remind me of the J.C. Higgins bike we bought back in the erly '60s (sorry, NOT a dumpster item, though!). We kept fixing thta old soldier several times. Finally, we got so FOND of it, we started thinking of it as an antique (which it WAS) AND a fine bike! BEFORE I could drive the '55 Firedome, that J.C Higgins saved me a TON of walking!!! Even NOW, all it lacks is an original, clean company PLATE to go on the very front.
My creeper, which is a large piece of cardboard box. Better than the wheeled kind, and cardboard cushions my elbows from scraping the floor, every few days I go past the mecical supply depot and pick up a new 'creeper'
BoydWho & JohnBoy, know anybody who re-pops those name plates for obsolete and EARLY brands of bicycles? Sorry to get off the thread a tad, guys!
Wait til election season ends at 9:01pm and get the corrugated plastic signs And the "freebar" posts too.
More kitchen cabinets, pegboard, slat board, lumber, and fluorescent lights than I could possibly ever use, BUT you can always trade them to friends who are building garages or who are moving into new houses for favors later I take the round heavy chrome pipes from clothing store fixtures and use them in the closets in my house. Heavy winter coats slide on the hangers with one finger! A couple of years ago I found a kid pushing a "side-by-side refrigerator-sized" formica covered cabinet towards the dumpster at the mall on a 2 wheel dolly. The poor kid was supposed to find a way to get this big heavy thing INTO the dumpster. He REALLY appreciated me stopping him and said that he had ANOTHER one just like it inside and asked if I wanted that one too. Lemme think about it kid... When the K-mart by my house was going out, they put all of the heavy metal shelving from the stockroom outside and taped a sign to it that said "free". 2 heaping pickup truck loads later... Also found three brand new unopened 5000' boxes of CAT5 computer network cable and about five new unopened cases of garbage bags in the dumpster when they opened a new COMPUSA near here. I'm STILL using the bags and COMPUSA has already gone out of business & closed! Found some neon letters for signs and neon tubes once. I pick up (relatively clean) used carpeting for the back half of the garage by the workbenches & shelves and just throw it away again when it gets too greasy & dirty. Beats walking on the hard, cold concrete! I also pick up vacuum cleaners and make the wife laugh when I vacuum the garage every now & then! (and claim ignorance about how they work INSIDE the house!) Found a nice Sawzall that someone at the construction site apparently was going to come back later for... but I got there first!
Hey 50CHEVYSUBURBAN! Those election signs make GREAT material for making patterns and teplates for stuff. It doesn't get as torn up and flimsy as cardboard will. AND it also makes a cheap covering for the ceiling in the garage! It's a "one man" install with some drywall screws into the rafters, and it reflects light really well and makes the garage a LOT brighter (assuming you put the candidate's faces pointing UP!) Hold it up with one hand and press a screw into it and it stays in place until you run it in with the cordless!
When I was 5 my dad was stationed in Rota Spain and I lived there for over a year off base. Our next door neighbor was a really cool old Spanish lesbian by the name of Pepa. She had a bright green moped she rode everywhere and I would often accompany her all over the Spanish countryside. I didn't know this at the time, but she was dirt poor. So poor that she stopped at the local convents where I would have my cheeks pinched by the old Spanish nuns and be given a glass of sweet milk while Pepa received charity. There were a couple farmers who gave her the use of their fields that had not produced that year and we'd spend countless hours in the sun pulling carrots literally as big as a #2 pencil. But the reason I tell you that is to tell you this. She was the master dumpster diver and knew when and where to go to pick up the best stash of goods on a given day. She was far too old to get in these dumpsters safely by herself, but she used to boost me up in there and tell me what to look for. Any toys I found I could keep, and I did. She was a really neat old woman who treated me like gold. One day, after a particularly greuling day pulling carrots, she stopped at the little market up the street from our villa. She pulls out a handful of pesetas (big money to a woman that poor) and bought me a small bag of honey roasted peanuts as a reward. She took me home and my dad took one look at those peanuts in my hand, knew that she had spent what little money she had on me, and proceeded to tear me a new asshole and give me a spanking. Pepa marched right up, caught my dad's hand, snatched the peanuts out of his other hand, thrust them into my hands, stuck her finger in my dad's face (my dad is 6'4" and she was 4' nothin) and read him the riot act. It might have been in Spanish, but you can tell when someone is swearing up a blue streak and she put my old man in his place. I found out she died about ten years ago, and still have a photo of her that makes me a little misty eyed. She was the queen of dumpster diving and making good with what she could scrounge and taught me a lot more about life than any school ever did. So, yeah, I've had my fair share of dumpster scores.
Gigantor ..i was going to make a comment about that statement of her "Receiving Charity"..after you went to the trouble to tell us all that she was a lesbian..but after finding out she died in the end of your story ...I just couldnt go there
HAHAHA!!! If anyone had a dirty sense of humor, it was Pepa. She held he pants up with a rope she was so hardcore. It's all good.
I keep my eyes open and have found a few good items over the years. My wife and I have a 12 year old who was shocked the other day when I pulled a perfect 30"x30"x18"deep wall mount stainless steel shop sink from a local middle school dumpster. He asked why I didn't just buy a new one, I replied it would've cost me almost a days wages after taxes, wouldn't be this heavy and it kept it out of the landfill. He still doesn't get it, but maybe someday.
"Found a nice Sawzall that someone at the construction site apparently was going to come back later for... but I got there first! " I don,t like the sound of that!
When I was a kid in the late 60's, my buddy & I would go over to Mattel's on Rosecrans and dig out Hot Wheels from the dumpster. Rejects, tests, samples.... Wish I had them now. Matt
"Smitty" Your Dumpster Dives got me to thinking about an old friend named "Smitty". A Vancouver businessman, it is by his voluntary performances as "Woo Woo the Clown" that he has won the hearts of thousands of children, many of them disabled, over the last thirty-five years. He once told me he had 72 companies at 72 years old. Wouldn't surprise me. He had many great stories. Turning him on was easy if he liked you but turning him off was near impossible. He used to visit me at a movie studio time to time. He would drive in like he owned the place, Huge personality! I was in his office once. There was a pathway leading to his desk through all of this stuff. The office was packed with most odd things from dumpsters. All clean and pristine. Clocks of all types, statues ect. The walls covered, It was like Alladin's Cave. The garbage buisness was a very tuff buisness. His survival was a testiment to his tenacity. I am surprised the "Goons" never offed him! Loved to talk of his life as Woo Woo the Clown. There was a little story about Ronald Macdonald using his hair/nose/makeup. I think he was also Masonic Master. They broke the mold after "Smitty' was born. ASCHER SMITH looked no further than the nearest alley to build his empire. He and wife Irene launched the Smithrite Disposal Services firm in 1947 and pioneered the automation of a hitherto-strong-arm business. A decade before retiring, Ascher Smith said: "Business turns me on. But the strain of being a businessman makes an old man of you -- and pretty damned fast, too." Still, he kept senior citizenship at bay doing something other corporate leaders might profitably copy. It entailed wearing a fright wig, strap-on red nose, two-foot-long floppy shoes and shoulder-width bow tie. Then, as Woo-Woo the clown, Smith became again the 13-year-old who ran away from his Medicine Hat home to join the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey circus. The showbiz life involved sleeping under wild-animal trailers, where he learned something that has close equivalents in the corporate world. "The elephants used to pee on us," Smith said. Order of Canada Ascher I. Smith, C.M. C.M. Burnaby, British Columbia Honour Appointment Investiture Member of the Order of Canada December 17, 1979 April 16, 1980 Though an active and respected Vancouver businessman, it is by his voluntary performances as "Woo Woo the Clown" that he has won the hearts of thousands of children, many of them disabled, over the last thirty-five years. Deceased on May 1, 2008.
yeah..but think of it this way..you got to screw the theif for once..they didnt get their prize..and you dont know who's it was so what are you supposed to do? you were just in the right place looking for a good dumpster score.. its not like it had a sign on it saying .."stolen from the place right behind you"
Dumpster diving comes in many forms - I was in to computers for a long time and the place where I was at was moving. So, they put stuff up "for sale" - for a total of about $12 I got a stack of 40+ 24" x 30" computer CPU covers, nice good gauge steel that I've used to box several frames and I still a bunch left, many, many HD grey shelving units that I've used, modified, and moved to 4 houses so far, many, many pieces of nice aluminum plate, old computer covers, 1 old Wang roll-around disk drive cabinet I not yet found a use for but will soon - again, all for $12 and I didn't even have to get near a dumpster. BTW, nearly all the lights in my shop were a "dumpter dive" by a buddy of mine - he got nearly 40-8' units, all stacked up nice and neat. I'm using 10, another guy has 10 or 12 and he's using the rest. He's also supplied me with a shop sink complete w/faucet and 4-4' flourescent lights in really nice enclosures. Ya just have to be at the right place and at the right time ....
Frito Lay's distributor was 1/2 mile fronm the house and we never bought chips. Hands were allways red from the pistachios. That was livin. I got a Yamaha400 from the dumpster once and it ran fine after it got a new piston. I had a buissess (?) cleaning rentals and claimed to be Eviction Specialist.. Thats like a dream come true. Best thing; Walther P-38, 9mm. Clean. With 2 cases of bulletts.
A couple of years ago I drove my son cross country to college in Olympia, Washington. I followed the old Route 66 wherever I could on the trip back to CT, stopping along the way to take photos (some of them are currently in a photo exhibit in CT) and poke around in abandoned buildings and gas stations. Somewhere in Texas I came across a rough old Recaro seat that looked like it came from one of the Porsche racing cars of the early 70's. I left it in the garbage pile and drove on, but kept thinking about it. I called a friend who restores these cars and described it to him. He said that the Carrera RS seats had cloth inserts, and because this one had vinyl, it was a Recaro model sold to put in any car and did not originally come in a Porsche 911. I said that it probably wasn't worth bothering with, and he said "Well, it's still probably worth around $1000!" So I found some black plastic garbage bags at the nearest Dollar Store (I was told the closest WalMart was 100 miles down the road) and put the crappy thing in the back of the SUV. My friend was a little high on the value, $13 high. It brought $987 on Ebay, which put a good sized dent in the travel expenses, and helped make the trip.
The Jalopy Journal
