Ok so we don't have 'dumpsters' in the UK but we do have skips. My wife of 23 years suggested we should go out for a quiet lunch for a change so I splashed out and took her to an all you can eat asian buffet (I know, it was a real treat but the greasy burger wagon had already been turned down) So suitably plump and walking back to the car I spot a skip (dumpster-ish UK thing) full of shop retail scrap including the remains of a relatively new belt checkout. Taken to pieces to take up less space left a rather nice top end 370W induction motor (Leroy Somer), I just had to.............. for some reason grabbing a motor from the skip and walking up the high street with it under your arm with the wife isn't 'normal behaviour'. Anyway the motor is good so I have a small linisher project for it. Should keep me busy while I wait to be allowed back into the house.........
It's amazing what people throw out in skip bins: I find myself slowing down when I go past one when on the road for my day job. There was a skip bin company next door to my friend's foundry and they would often drop off a choice skip for careful sorting through and analysis. One of the better skips was from a welding shop that closed down: we found piles of new linisher belts in zirconia, aluminium oxide and silicon carbide. There was a large stock of TIG filler rods, stick welding rods in steel, stainless and nickel, buckets of obscure brass MIG and gas welder fittings. Another skip was loaded with 40 and 50 taper milling machine cutters and maybe 20 sets of outside jaws for three jaw chucks: I've found homes for several jaw sets for free and use a couple myself for Ebay chucks. The 50 taper tooling was given away and I kept the 40- taper tooling. I have a large selection of plywood, aluminium sheet, plastic sheet, nylon round bar, steel sheet all found as offcuts in bins.
Wow great find!! Crazy what people throw out. The people who gave me my south bend lathe threw out a whole tool room of bits and machines. Unfortunately I wasn't there early enough for the tooling. Pics of your haul??
The best dumpsters belong to the US military, If you knew a 1/100th of the brand new snap on tools we threw out, it would make you SICK!
The welding shop haul was about 10 years ago so no photos of it, just stuff squirrelled away. These two drill presses were taken from rubbish piles, the 21 inch, 5Hp Hercus camelback drill on the right is awaiting restoration: it was left in the rain in a rubbish pile at a workshop due to health and safety concerns (no belt guards) . The Woolworths Taiwanese drill was missing the handles, spindle nut and motor and came from a local rubbish dump. This is all I have left of the outside chuck jaws and milling tapers after giving most of the 50 tapers and some jaw sets away. The most recent score is ten sheets of a 3 layer aluminium sandwich board: it's not corrugated inside but has circular dimples in a honeycomb pattern and finished in architectural bronze anodize on one side. There's a lot of long sheets and plenty about 3'x4' in size, I'm using them to make my new furnace blower housing.
I like the DP on the right.. The one on the left could have come from harbor freight at the end of the day.
It's actually not too bad: 1983 vintage so the column tube is 1/2" wall, centrifugally cast iron, 12 speed, morse 2 taper and now has a 1.5HP variable speed DC motor. I fitted eccentric bushes to the pinion shaft for a snug fit between the rack and pinion so there's no chatter when using a countersink. It took while but I had the time to fix it up and it's quite good now...still not a silk purse though
There was an awful lot more 'good' stuff in there but I was alreading risking divorce grabing the motor! Overnight shop fitters value their time over what the see as junk that needs shifting.
To be fair to her Mark we have been together nearly 28 years and she knows me by now so I didn't really get too much of a hard time, more than once my collective junk has kept us going when things break during hard times (of which there have been too many!) I think the only time I really over-stepped the mark was when I arrived home drunk with a complete road light plus part of the pole. It had been knocked down by a car and I recognised it as a unit I helped design when I was 17 some 30 years earlier, it was an emotional attachment to a 'pidgeon crap covered piece of shit' too far!!! My wife says I have two faults, one is I don't listen, the other I don't know because I wasn't......
