Craigslist score

[Mulekicker]

So I bought 6 old metal component drawer organizers for $25 from an avionics place near the airport today. Half of them were still filled with parts, so that was a sweet bonus. Nothing too great. A bunch of IC's, most of which I probably can't use, but there are about 15 ca3130's, plus some other usable opamps and cmos chips.  The best find though is 7 dimmable indicator lights similar to the ones Spaceman uses. When you turn them a small lens opens and closes. This just bumped the Sputnik to the top of my build list.  Anyway, the reason I'm posting is to hear stories about any good, cheap, old components you guys have come across. I love recycling old parts and constantly look through thrift stores for old radios I can harvest germanium transistors from. Seems to me that most people look upon a lot of the parts we ascribe mojo to as junk. Anyone have any great finds?

[Travis]

Nice one! Those lenses sound cool, I though Spaceman were just using amp jewels

I don’t really look out for radios etc as I never really see them cheap enough to not just buy NOS parts, but I got like 200 Ge transistors from an old broken organ once. You can imagine how much it cost to build that thing back in the day

I bought 5 broken old pedals from a guy for dirt cheap once and one of them was a Mutron Phasor II which took like 2 seconds to repair, another was a stack of dimes crybaby which wasn’t even broken at all, and then 3 DOD pedals which had some cool ICs and transistors

Also my girlfriend used to work at a place that made blood testing equipment and she got me a bunch of really high quality resistors but most of them are in weird values. She also got me some cool axial Sprague tantalum caps from there

[Mulekicker]

Organs are a great example. So much went into them and now people give em away. My garage would be full of em if my wife wouldn't kill me.

[Travis]

I couldn’t tell you which models to look out for, but I think it may have been common practice to use transistors for switching if you think of each key on a keyboard as a switch. That would probably only pertain more to the Farfisa or synth type stuff rather than Hammond type stuff.

Some of those are really cool sounding instruments already so it would be a shame to dismantle them unless they are totally beyond repair

Now I’m digressing but what would be really cool to grab from a broken organ would be a rotating speaker assembly/motor.

[Mulekicker]

I agree 100%

[SpaceCommandant]

Very similar score for me. About a year back I nabbed five or six organizers for $15 CAD off of an old electronics enthusiast *full* of hundreds of transistors.. some NOS, others pulled from old equipment (silicon/germanium/jfets); hundreds (probably thousands) of caps; piles of ICs; a few transformers; etc.
It’s a little overwhelming. Still haven’t really dug into it yet.

[Dex3887]

A lot of the early organs have 220mh-680mh inductors on the tone generator board/assembly I have a seller on eBay I follow that sells them from time to time for $10 and they are loaded. The yamaha made Hammond boards have the good tdk ones, but only a few. I think it's swinger organs are loaded out with house numbered 3080s and 4558s in sockets. A lot of fun to be had digging around in old "junk" gear.