What's the coolest thing you've found in the Dumpster?

[pablo batt]

ice

[Stephen Fritz]

A Kindermann 2 1/4 inch slide projector in mint cosmetic and operational condition.

[Renato Tonelli]

I work at a University and occasional trips to the basement dumping areas have yielded interesting finds over the years.
Two large dry mounting presses. I refurbished one with a new foam pad (if you would like to pick up the other one (NYC), PM me).
A sturdy metal table to cut mats.
A complete (lenses, boards, carriers) 4x5 Omega enlarger: I think I started to drool. (Gave it to a friend who never used it).

[Ben Syverson]

A giant Polaroid machine that looked like a Xerox machine. It had an 8x10" (11x14?) glass surface with a articulated lid like a copier, and a few buttons for entering number of copies, etc. But when you looked through the glass, you saw a big mirror, and at the right-hand side of the device was a motorized 35mm back, and a Polaroid back that took 669 and similar.

When you hit the main button "Copy?" it would fire a strobe, which would expose the 35mm and Polaroid simultaneously. The film backs had optics so that the entire 8x10" copier area would exactly fit into the frame for both 35mm and Polaroid.

In other words, you could use this beast to archive documents onto B&W 35mm, reproduce 8x10 photos as color Polaroids, etc. I'm sure for about 15 minutes in the late 1980s it was the most useful office appliance ever made.

Some friends found it in an alley behind a school, waiting to be picked up by streets & san. I wound up taking it, and found that the 35mm back wasn't working (which probably why it was thrown out). But after carefully realigning the plastic blades of the focal plane shutter, which had been pushed apart and out of position, the whole thing worked like a charm.

Now that I think back on it, I had that thing in my first-ever apartment, which was barely large enough to fit a twin bed and a minifridge! To this day, I don't know what that machine was called. Google is no help.

[BarryS]

I was at a CompUSA store around closing and I saw some employees taking a big cart of computers out to the dumpster. I stuck around until they went back into the store and pulled seven computers out of the dumpster. None of them were working, but I pulled out a ton of perfectly good components--hard drives, memory cards, etc--enough to build several good computers and repair/upgrade a few more.

[Frank Petronio]

I've always shied away from buying any used photo equipment from New Mexico and Utah addresses because I figure the military has probably irradiated much of the surplus and trashed equipment that you see coming out of there.... How do I know that mint Crown Graphic wasn't used as part of some nuclear bomb or biological weapon test?

So.... scavengers from Los Alamos, I'm onto you! ;-)

[IanMazursky]

Cool things found in a dumpster...I love this thread! I spend way to much thinking about this.

One of the labs i work for always has some fun stuff. With their permission, I ended up with a few of those in line water filtration units, a whole mess of parts from a refrema and lots of misc small parts.
I have found on the streets of NYC some good network cable, computer parts and the occasional clean 16x20 box.

One day i came out of a clients office and i saw a giant dumpster filled with fabric, leather, elastic and all sorts of cool things form a leather store that had flooded.
Most of it was in great condition and I didn't feel so bad since 10 other people were doing the same thing.
I used some of the elastic to make a band that holds my GG protector on my 12x20.

So much good stuff is thrown out everyday. I wish more people would think to donate it or put it up for free on craigslist.

[John Schneider]

A large Kreonite darkroom sink, with deep well sink, shallow sink, and print washer. It had to be 8-10' long and annoyed my wife to no end while it sat in the side yard for a few years.

[eddie]

are we restricted to actually pulling from the dumpster?

i bought 4 GIANT brass lenses from a guy who pulled them from a dumpster.

a voigtlander 7b, dallmeyer 2a, and two 25 inch RR.

[Richard Wasserman]

Not photo related, but I pulled several chunks of the Wrigley building out of a dumpster in downtown Chicago. The facade was being repaired and some of the terra-cotta cladding was being replaced. I found some nice brackets and trim pieces that currently reside in my garden.