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

[Robert A. Zeichner]

I do set limits for how far into a Dumpster I will go. This is usually as far as opening the door, looking inside and extracting only those items that are easily within my reach while standing outside. Occasionally I'll use an object within reach to get to an object out of reach. Anything covered with or sitting in slime is off limits.

So, this week in the office park where I work, I found a near mint Hardigg rotationally molded 24" x 16" x 18" polyethylene shipping case with 7 plated latches, two handles and a hinged, gasketed lid. Inside was a block of foam that was custom cut for some kind of instrument or delicate assembly. Without foam, approximately $300 new. Perfect for shipping the 8x10 Deardorff I just sold. I've noticed lately that with business closures and down-sizing, a lot of useful stuff is getting pitched because nobody wants to move it.

If my cell phone were modern enough to download ring tones, I would surely opt for the theme from Sanford & Son.

Anyone else find anything worthwhile lately?

[DJGainer]

For me, adjacent to refuse is refuse.

[paulr]

On top of a dumpster in brooklyn: a huge, beautifully printed Joel Peter Witkin book, and Ansel Adams' autobiography. Made a nice set!

[Mike1234]

Free CLEAN bubble wrap, peanuts, and large boxes from the days I did a LOT of feeBay sales... the dumpsters behind big reatil stores (NOT restaurants). I could easily collect $100-200 worth of packing supplies in 10-20 minutes.

[John Kasaian]

A friend got his Omega D-2 with all the goodies out of a University dumpster. So far I haven't found a bloody thing worth bringing home.

[Mark Sawyer]

So far I haven't found a bloody thing worth bringing home.

After I die, you may find my life's work in a dumpster. And you'll still be able to post that same quote... :)

[Mike1234]

LOL, Mark!!

[jnantz]

not me, but a friend found 33 typewriters in a university dumpster ..

[Eric Rose]

My first wife's engagement ring. It fell off her finger when taking out the trash from her jewelery store. As it turned out I should have chucked her in after it and keep on moving. Would have been way cheaper in the long run.

[Mike1234]

^^^ An all too common story...

[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 (http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=7403492) 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.

[Roger Thoms]

I found enough styro foam to pack up a Zone VI print washer and ship it cross country without damage. Thought it was pretty cool at the time as I was wondering how I was going to pad the darn thing.

Roger

[paulr]

I was at a CompUSA store around closing and I saw some employees taking a big cart of computers out to the dumpster...

A guy I used to work with (an older, cowboy hat-wearing, viet nam vet graphic designer and computer nut) had memorized the garbage day schedule of the building where we worked. He found they were always tossing out perfectly good computers. He got plenty of decent CRT monitors, and even a few power macs that were only a few years out of date. Most of the computers had been stripped of their innards (memory, drives, etc.), but he had piles of that stuff at home.

[drew.saunders]

I rescued a dumpster-bound Leica 35mm slide projector with a 200mm lens from a former employer. It still worked really well, provided you had enough distance to the wall for the huge lens. It's one of the older 1-slide-at-a time (holds 2) projectors, so I paid real money for a Leica that took trays later.

[Robert A. Zeichner]

are we restricted to actually pulling from the dumpster?

i bought 4 GIANT brass lenses (http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=7403492) from a guy who pulled them from a dumpster.

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

No, the items in question are related, just simply "once removed"

[bigdog]

Six foot projection screen.

[bvstaples]

I was working for a fine art publisher in the early 90s. When the owners closed the business, they were cleaning out the building, and I watched them toss what I thought was a process camera into the dumpster. I went to retrieve it and I found an 8x10 Cambo with a 450mm Nikkor-M lens, a box with miscellaneous filter holders, an old Wollensack 75mm lens, and 10 film holders.

I still have the Cambo, it started me in LF and I've grown from there (meaning I've acquired more cameras, lenses and equipment and have become a much poorer man for it).

Brian

[Robert A. Zeichner]

So I checked out the Dumpster on the way to picking up the mail today and spotted some plastic movie reel looking things. Upon closer inspection noticed that these were reels of printed circuit components. I had no interest, but sent our service tech to check it out and he retrieved over $9,000 worth of tantalum capacitors in values he uses! Holy crap on a cracker.

[percepts]

I had no idea this was a forum for bin divers :D

[jaimeb82]

Half of a Mamiya 7II, yes half of the camera only. The back of the camera was probably there but couldn't find it.

[vinny]

My dad and I use to dive at the local lumber yard once he sent me in for a 12volt cordless dewalt drill, another time I got a huge box of scratch off tickets that were part of a promotion they had put on. We spent 20 minutes scratching off about a hundred of them, took them inside and claimed our winnings, dozens of coffee mugs, knives, etc. They were pissed!

[BetterSense]

In college I was in the regrettable position of being the thrower-awayor. I was an equipment/lab assistent for the physics department which was cleaning out old rooms to take over. I must have thrown nearly an entire darkroom worth of equipment in the dumpster, neither me nor my professors having any idea what it was, and thinking it was just lab equipment. Only in retrospect did I realize what I had done. Thankfully I did save a process camera (it being identifiable as a camera), which I stole the lens of off recently, years later, now that I'm into photography.

[Michael Graves]

I was working for a fine art publisher in the early 90s. When the owners closed the business, they were cleaning out the building, and I watched them toss what I thought was a process camera into the dumpster. I went to retrieve it and I found an 8x10 Cambo with a 450mm Nikkor-M lens, a box with miscellaneous filter holders, an old Wollensack 75mm lens, and 10 film holders.

I still have the Cambo, it started me in LF and I've grown from there (meaning I've acquired more cameras, lenses and equipment and have become a much poorer man for it).

Brian

DAMN! And I though my Norman 500 with four light heads was good.

[Brian Sims]

I found an opaque projector with an enormous lens in a dumpster. I had been asked by an elementary school to do a project on photography. So I mounted the lens on a refrigerator box and cut a door in it. I mounted white paper opposite the lens and it became a walk-in camera. It was great fun to see 3-4 magnified faces looking out the lens....and then telling them to turn around and hearing, "hey, it's upside down!" I hope there was at least one LFer created in that box.

[Gary L. Quay]

A Beseler 4x5 enlarger minus the condenser head. I'm refitting it to be an 8x10 enlarger.

--Gary

[Robert A. Zeichner]

Well, yesterday toward the end of the work day, one of our engineers made a trip out to the Dumpster to see what might be lurking. He immediately spotted a whole bunch of software, discs, cables, AC adapters etc. and while rummaging through the pile, heard a little beeping sound. Beep..........beep..........beep.......... Further digging revealed an IBM Thinkpad laptop that had been pitched without even being turned off. "It was literally calling out to me" he said. "Save me, save me."

[DrTang]

Linhof tech III 4x5, kinda beat but usable.. with a Wollensak 15" tele in shutter

as a result of some kind of divorce squabble

I can blame that for starting my down the LF path


next best was about 4 bankers boxes filled with Apeture magazines

[Jody_S]

Agfa transparency scanner with all the masks up to 8x10. Used that for a couple of years before finding a higher-res scanner at the flea market for $20.

[Richard M. Coda]

Nothing photographic (well, maybe)... but when I was 11 (1971), after we had moved to Pompton Lakes, NJ (and across the street from the Elks Club) I found a bunch of Playboy Magazines...

[Pawlowski6132]

For me, adjacent to refuse is refuse.

lame.

[cosmicexplosion]

I just found a laminator and a slide style cutter gilatine type thingy

As a builder I am always finding timber storage boxes you name it.

Today I hauled sand from a skip to cement my shed so water goes out not in

Not very exiting

But I am a pretty good recycler

I think this thread goes Hand in hand with general rubbish fosseking
In which case just about every bit of furniture I own comes from
The affluent suburbs I live in

It never seases to amaze me the stuff I find.

Hoarding is a hard to controll disease especially when you have a knack
For finding cool shit.

[Drew Bedo]

For me, adjacent to refuse is refuse.

Sounds like the "Seinfeld" episode about George eating a donut out of the kitchen trash can . . .he claimed it was "above the rim" and so didn't qualify as garbage.

[Jason Greenberg Motamedi]

Years ago I watched someone toss a box with a Linhof Tech IV and a pile of film holders into a dumpster near where B&H used to be downtown. Naturally I crawled into the dumpster and pulled it out. The bellows were shot, but it had a nice cammed 135mm Xenotar mounted to it. I also pulled a Gitzo 326 out of the same dumpster. I sold the Technika long ago, but still have the Gitzo.

Actually, on rereading the title, I think the "coolest" thing I found was a King Concept Imagemaker II, a semi-automated rotary processing machine capable of C41, E6, Cibachrome, and all sorts of B&W variations. It was placed next to (does this still count?) a dumpster in Minneapolis, along with half a dozen unopened cases of 5 gallon E6 chemicals, and a few other tools, such as a second tempering bath and some cylinders and beakers. Lucky for me, I had a pickup.

[ImSoNegative]

found a very nice minolta 35mm camera and 3 nice lenses in a bag, including a vivitar flash, i thought someone got pissed at someone else, and threw away there gear.

[C. D. Keth]

Nothing photographic (well, maybe)... but when I was 11 (1971), after we had moved to Pompton Lakes, NJ (and across the street from the Elks Club) I found a bunch of Playboy Magazines...

With value scaled to your age at the time of the find, I think you're by far the winner!

[Richard M. Coda]

With value scaled to your age at the time of the find, I think you're by far the winner!

I did feel like I had hit the jackpot! :cool:

[ImSoNegative]

lol

[ndavid813]

Like Mr. Coda, when I was 12 my buddy and I were just finishing our paper routes and saw a guy drive up in his porche (fresh from having his stash discovered by his wife/gf we think) to a dumpster in back of the local super market and throw away about 30 Playboys, Penthouses, Hustlers and Ouis. We put them in our newspaper bags and took them home. 12 year olds being in the right place at the right time made us think that there actually might be a higher power looking out for us.

[eddie]

this:

84802

[Michael Cienfuegos]

Sounds like the "Seinfeld" episode about George eating a donut out of the kitchen trash can . . .he claimed it was "above the rim" and so didn't qualify as garbage.

That donut would have never passed the "five second rule" !

[Eric James]

No, no, no, no - it was an eclair, and it was above the rim:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKC5jjFkfgo

[Ari]

No, no, no, no - it was an eclair, and it was above the rim:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKC5jjFkfgo

Homer Simpson would never have had such a moral dilemma.

[Shootar401]

A Dell laptop that only needed a new HD. I only use Macs so I turned around and sold it on the bay for a few hundred.
Laminator with some 4x6 and ID size laminating sheets
Mitsubishi VGA projector, probably for the Dell laptop. Works great 3 years later.

A drum scanner about 6 years ago on the Brown campus when I was living in Providence. I'm still kicking myself in the ass over that one.

[Frank Knapp]

I got a couple trash cans worth of film when they emptied out the freezer in the photo building at my school. 35mm to 4x5, including some 4x5 polaroid film. Wish they had thrown out the 8x10 film too...