Why do we keep so much damn radio crap?

[ke7trp]

Why cant we throw it out?  I looked around last week and was just shocked at what I have here at the house. This week in my spare time I went through each room one by one.  Tonight was the big haul trip.  I got two friends over and we spent 2 hours hauling out stuff that I wont use, We filled a truck bed to the TOP with useless junk.  I have a room full of transmitters and receivers STILL. 

4!!!  Valiants... WHY???
2 BWs!!!
2 Rangers!  Why!!
over 20 Recievers!!! 
4!!!  SP600s!!!! what the hell will I do with 4 SP600s???
2 complete FT101 stations!
6 antenna tuners... All SSB hammy hambone types.
must be 5 or 6 Amplifiers. 

Its all going. Little by little. I can see my work bench now.. Tomorrow I organize it so I can work on gear again. Its really a sickness. No matter how much room you have, after one year, It just piles up!  BOXES and BOXES of tubes, , caps, resistors and parts! 

I for one am making a real effort to NOT have this happen again.  one more good truck load out of here and I will be in decent shape. Anyone else have this happen?  I bet most of you!!!

C

[KC4VWU]

If you saw my shack right now, it would scare the hell out of you. It's got so out of hand, I can't do anything with it. Big 'fest coming up in a couple weekends and I'm loading up the truck... NO MORE PROJECTS! All I'll be bringing back will be parts to complete what I have going right now.

You're right, it is a sickness; but it could be something much worse. It does keep one home and out of trouble.

Phil

[KA2DZT]

I think all Hams are cut from the same mold.  I've been trying to clean up my shops for 30 years with little success.  Right now,  I can no longer even get into my garages.  The mice have moved out complaining about a lack of space  

Every workbench (about 10) I have is covered with 6 to 10 inches of stuff.   The basement is well organized with tons of metal shelving units and dozens of heavy metal draw (parts) cabinets and still there are parts and pieces all over the floor.

My shops are a work in progress.

Fred, KA2DZT

[The Slab Bacon]

Same here!! Do I really need 19 receivers and 17 transmitters  

Hell No! ! !

Why do we do it   


BECAUSE WE CAN! ! ! ! ! ! !             

[N4LTA]

I tore the meniscus in my left knee on Monday jumping off my truck tailgate and am waiting to get it scoped.

Last night I hobbled out to the garage looking for a transformer amongst the junk. My knee let go and down I went across a pile of radios and other junk. There was so much junk there was no place to fall. I probably wouldn't have fallen if there wasn't so much junk that there was no walking path. I was lucky I didn't kill myself.

I'll bet my work bench is the worst in the country and the floor around it is worse than ridiculous.

[W9GT]

Yes, and I thought I was the only one who had so much junk!    I recently got rid of most of my Heathkit collection, which was nice, but mostly became "shelf queens" and just sat there for years.  Lots of other gear fills every possible nook and cranny in the shack and the workshop.

I really enjoy collecting parts and "stuff" for projects, but I probably have more than I will ever use in my lifetime.  The one project that never seems to get completed is cleaning up the shack (just ask the XYL!).

73,  Jack, W9GT

[Todd, KA1KAQ]

Why cant we throw it out?  I looked around last week and was just shocked at what I have here at the house.
4!!!  Valiants... WHY???
2 BWs!!!
2 Rangers!  Why!!
over 20 Recievers!!! 
4!!!  SP600s!!!! what the hell will I do with 4 SP600s???
2 complete FT101 stations!
6 antenna tuners... All SSB hammy hambone types.
must be 5 or 6 Amplifiers. 

It creeps up on ya, Clark. As someone who had between 300-400 rigs in recent years and also visited and survived Slab's basement a few times, I think it's a somewhat universal thing for many AMers and hands-on hams in general.

For me, it started decades ago when I was the dumb kid in the radio club who'd haul home home anything with tubes in it. Got a lot of cool free stuff that way, still have some of it. The first culling of the herd resulted in a number of my nice pre-war sets hitting the road in favor of newer, 'better' gear.

Then in 1994 I bought my first house, a 19 room 3000+ sq ft Victorian fixer-upper with a 2 story carriage house. A single guy with a good paying job and all that space, well.....HUZman has pics from some of the BBQs we had there, I'm sure they're quite frightening. Between work, travel, women, house repairs, whatever else, the 'accumulating' aspect ended up filling in for actual use and operation. Especially when the internet came along making it sooooo easy for find more cool stuff.

Its all going. Little by little. I can see my work bench now.. Tomorrow I organize it so I can work on gear again. Its really a sickness. No matter how much room you have, after one year, It just piles up!  BOXES and BOXES of tubes, , caps, resistors and parts! 

I for one am making a real effort to NOT have this happen again.  one more good truck load out of here and I will be in decent shape. Anyone else have this happen?  I bet most of you!!!

You've made the big leap! You've realized that it comes to a point where you have so much of it, it becomes increasingly difficult to enjoy any of it. No need to throw it away, though. Sell some and get other things you need or have wanted to try. Give stuff to friends, it's good for your karma and there's no packing or shipping involved.

So it's all good. I'm down to around 150 rigs now (that includes things like ARC-5 sets, wooden broadcast receivers, anything radio), and as tough as it once was to even think of parting with any of them, the weight lifted from your shoulders literally and figuratively when you finally do is amazing. I still get a radio now and then, but the interest is much more focused, and the rule of 'one out for one in' has run closer to 4:1 in favor of things leaving. Have to admit - having a wife and a smaller house provides some incentive, too. 

Welcome to the enlightened packrats. No doubt some kind of a 10 step program. Don't be surprised if you fall off the wagon a few times before you succeed in clearing out all of the excess. It took a while to accumulate, after all.

[k4kyv]

I hope you are not throwing "stuff" in the dump unless it really is useless junk (weak tubes, leaky capacitors, broken tube sockets, etc).  If it is perfectly good equipment, parts and components that you simply don't have a use for, for God's sake give someone else the opportunity to take it off your hands.  Don't just throw it away. Some of this stuff can be pure unobtanium when needed for a project if one doesn't already have it in the junk collection, and less and less of it shows up at hamfests each year.  Why not list it on the net and invite others to come pick through it free for the taking? Too much useful but "out of production" radio material has already needlessly gone to the dump.

Inevitably, whenever I get rid of something, not even a fortnight passes before I discover that I have a need for it. I often do building projects that I could never have completed if I hadn't held onto odds and ends acquired decades earlier, and it continuously amazes me how often things I had always thought of as common items are no longer available at any price.

My current construction project is a complete  rebuild of my antenna tuner system.  So far, I have made use of insulated shaft couplings, worm drive mechanisms, 90° drive mechanisms, variable capacitors, ceramic insulators, brass spacers, a couple of small transformers, some circuit board scrap, several jumbo ceramic switches, metal shafts, a large industrial grade wirewound pot, as well as a couple of oddball meters, and the  project still isn't finished.  All stuff that has been here for at least a decade or two or three, stuff that I would have had no idea what I might ever use it for as recently as five years ago. This even includes a pile of sheet metal scrap that I have held onto; I could never have built the mounting hardware for the major components without it.

I can usually build about anything I want from scratch without having to beg, borrow, buy or steal anything, or at most, maybe one or two items, since I essentially have my own private radio parts warehouse. Whenever something leaves here for the dump, it is guaranteed to be junk (crapped out tubes, resistors, capacitors, transformers, scraps of hookup wire, broken insulators, etc). I do sometimes load visitors up with goodies that I know I'll never use.  Derb took away quite a haul last summer when he visited here.

Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

[WBear2GCR]

I think it is because a) you might need it and b) it is so KEWL!!

I mean, you can not go out and buy most of this stuff from a distributor...

I have the same problem, although it is not all quite such "cream of the crop" sort of stuff.
No way can I keep it all clean or properly organized. SPACE is the evil twin, lack of that is.
You need more space than things by a % in order to maintain clean.

So, I feel for everyone.
What is good is that I am prepared to HELP anyone out that really needs help.
Feel free to ship excess SP600 or similar gear here.
If ur close enough I can rent a U-Haul and come over to re-establish your open space!!
Anywhere in the NE within about 200mi, I'm there!
...well probably...

Although actually, I too am thinning the herd here... the bottom of the "food chain" is going bye-bye. My new philosophy is that if you can't find it or get to it, it "isn't there" and has no value. So, out with the marginal crap. Like that pile of computers that were good more than 5 years ago, and I might want to pull the supplies and extract the parts like the HV filter caps... Nope, out. Out with the nice 17" flat screen Trinitron monitors too... out.

Geez it is a struggle, eh?

                    _-_-bear

[k4kyv]

No way can I keep it all clean or properly organized. SPACE is the evil twin, lack of that is.
You need more space than things by a % in order to maintain clean.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, nature abhors a flat surface.

[KC2YOI]

Welp.......
I just saved OVER 1200 POUNDS of boat ancher electronics and reloading equipment from a dumpster over the past 2 days.
My Half ton truck needs a hernia belt.
I feel nauseous over the sudden injection of crap into my life but I couldn't let it go to landfill and the newly single mom of 3 needed the cash.
I will organize the mess and bring 90% to a fester when I can.
I'm numb from all this crap.
                                              DJ
PS There are a dozen or so phil and aud. xfmrs in there, a commercial Collins mod deck and a couple dozen monster and medium mil & comm caps. I'm at a loss to ID quite a few. i'll post pics of the tags soon. Some neat stuff.

[ke7trp]

I am not throwing good stuff out,  Only Trash and total scrap heaps. I just want to try to get all the radio crap out of the house.  I am looking into having a shack built out back or having an office storage container put in.  It seems never ending. I just want some nice gear and the rest, I want it gone.

T3 and R390
304TL by 4-400 with perfect SP600
Icom and one SSB amp
King 500 and SX28
Globe champ 300 and SP600
ranger/tbolt and NC300


THATS IT!!!!!!  The rest is off to ebay or ham fests! Get it out of here!  Today after work, I have to stack endless caps, resistors and parts into a slide out Drawer cabinet I got. Then my work table is back.  This weekend, I have to go through about 2000 tubes and put them all in boxes and stack in a closet.  Alot of this gear is my brothers.  He is comming by today to get about 8 Stereo speakers and a waste high stack of audio gear to take to auction.  There is hope!!!


C

[K1JJ]

Every five years or so we all need to go thru the piles and pull out the stuff we don't need anymore. (That is hard to predict, of course)  Then sell it off or put the word out it's free for the taking. Someone will take it for free. But SOME carcasses are so useless they must be sent to the recycler or dump. (like old computer stuff, chassis that have 1000 holes, etc)

I did that 5 years ago - netted about $6 grand and never regretted it. It leaves lots of gaps for new stuff too...  I still saved enuff parts to maintain all my rigs, however.

Another rule I have is if something is not used or not working in the shack, it gets put downstairs into cellar storage. Everything in the shack must work perfectly or be USED from time to time, otherwise out it goes..

We need to cultivate an attitude of having no mercy when it comes to cleaning out the junk pile.  I realize we may need something later, but it's the only way to keep reasonable control.

Has anyone seen the "American Pickers" show on TV where two guys drive around the country looking for old stuff to buy and resell? Well, some of those junk piles they come across are legendary. Some hoarders have four or five buildings stuffed with  the most useless, rusted old crap you can imagine - and a few won't part with any of it!!   Some guys got it baaaad...

T

 

[ke7trp]

Tom.  I just realized that show pickers must have made an impact on me.  That is why I have been "Gestapo" cleaning mode   I dont want to end up like that.

I have the exact same rule here.. If it is not working and being used on a daily or weekly basis, its NOT in my shack!  Its in the store room. 

Have NO MERCY.  I realized I have about a dozen "american 5" type radios I recapped and cleaned up a few years back. It was a neat project to keep me busy when alot of crap was going on in my life.  NOW THEY MUST GO!  What the hell will I ever do with those? NOTHING.

C

[The Slab Bacon]

Yea, but............................

How many times have all of us thrown something away or given it away figgering we'll never need or use it.

then low and behold we need one for a project and had to buy it again for an exorbetant price just to finish something up!     

Been there, done that!!

I'll let the YL worry about it when I'm gone, she at least has a feel for what it is worth.

Maybe she'll use some of it for door prizes at my funeral      

[SM6OID]

Hej !

Well, why do we collect stuff? A good question!

I have...

2 SP600 JX-21
2 51J-4
1 R-390A
1 T47/ART13
1 Set No 19
300+ BC radios from 1924 up to mid 50's
A large number o vacuum tubes.
1 Russian torpedo boat engine (please see my avatar)
2 tank engines (1 RR Meteor and 1 Russian from the T55 tank)
1 Dodge D400 Fire engine
2 Rolls Royce B80 engines (inline 8 )
PLUS a few more things...

So, why do I collect stuff?

a) Because I can
b) I'm interested in technical stuff

[ke7trp]

Collecting to me is something different then the situation alot of us are in.  If you are interested in things like that and restore them great. But this is very different that Crap and JUNK that ends up all over the place to the point you cant move around a room or garage.

C

[WA3VJB]

Welp.......
I just saved OVER 1200 POUNDS of boat ancher electronics and reloading equipment from a dumpster over the past 2 days.

GOOD MAN.

Why do we keep so much ?

BECAUSE WE CAN !

[WA1GFZ]

Tom,
I watched American Pickers when I was in LA. Man some people think their crap is gold.
A friend just cleaned out his basement and made $7K He bought a 75A4 in a junk store for $100 and sent it to W3HM years ago and it was part of the haul that went down the road.
I think we collect this stuff because we couldn't afford it when we were kids so buy it now to feel good. 

[KB2WIG]

Ya need at least 5 of anything. (Xyl's excepted).

More to follow.



klc

[WA1GFZ]

HMMM 5 XYLs  HMMMMM
better to burn out than fade away

[The Slab Bacon]

5 XYLs would guarantee me a suite at the rubber room!! One is DEFINATELY enough to drive a man crazy.

[The Slab Bacon]

Hej !

Well, why do we collect stuff? A good question!

I have...

2 SP600 JX-21
2 51J-4
1 R-390A
1 T47/ART13
1 Set No 19
300+ BC radios from 1924 up to mid 50's
A large number o vacuum tubes.
1 Russian torpedo boat engine (please see my avatar)
2 tank engines (1 RR Meteor and 1 Russian from the T55 tank)
1 Dodge D400 Fire engine
2 Rolls Royce B80 engines (inline 8 )
PLUS a few more things...

So, why do I collect stuff?

a) Because I can
b) I'm interested in technical stuff

Now, this is a man after my own heart!!!

Lets see, I collect antique broadcash receivers, boatanchor ham gear, antique gas and steam engines, Old MoPar stuff, and cactus.

Hmmmmm............. did I forget anything??

Oh yea, motorcycles, Harley-Davidson stuff, tools, and Lawn Boy mowers.

[N8UH]

I'm on the other side of the spectrum... I need to actually BUY junk to get projects done. I'm sad to say I don't have a proper junk box. Variable caps? Sleaze-Pay. Inductors? Sleaze-Pay. Transformers? Sleaze-Pay and huge shipping costs. Ahhh well...

[The Slab Bacon]

Oh yea, my wife collects stuffed-jointed teddy bears, costume jewelery, and any kind of Harley-Davidson memorabilia.

But NONE of us have ANYTHING on Vortex Joe!! He collects EVERYTHING!!