More Thrift Store Treasures (MANY More)

It's been a while sine I have shared with you the great stuff I have found lately in our local thrift stores. Since I have a moment, I figured I would rectify that oversight now, so hang on to your hats, or I just might buy them at the thrift store!

First up is the great little reel-to-reel I found pushed all the way back on the bottom shelf in the electronics section of the thrift store. The poor little thing stared up at me forlornly with it's two big reels just begging me to take him home. I picked him up, plugged him in, and discovered he was DOA.

Even though I didn't get so much as a spark out of the little guy, I could sense he had some life left in him, so I bundled him up, paid the $15.00 asking price, and took him home. The first thing I usually do when I find an off-beat item like this is to see what Google has to say about it, so I plugged in "Wollensak 3M 5750", and found next to nothing. The most hits were returned from a site built by a guy who rescued a 5750 off of eBay. Also DOA, he restored his machine to it's former glory, and like me was surprised to discover the fantastic sound quality this baby packs!

It also folds up nice and compact for a groovy beach party, or sleepover.

By the way, I lucked out on my Wollensak. All that was wrong with mine was a stuck reset button. I un-stuck the button and have been in reel-to-reel aural heaven ever since.

I also dug up in a different thrift store a Hewlett Packard 4L laserjet printer for my office at work. I work for a small, family owned company, and often the budget is just as small. We have a nice fax/scanner/printer/copier up in the telephone/network closet, but I am lazy, and hated walking all the way up there from my office each time I needed to print a document, so I had been on the look out for a good printer for quite some time. The HP 4L is a great little printer, especially for the $12.00 I paid for it. It came with the toner cartridge in it, and all I needed to make it compatible with my desktop at work was a parallel-USB converter cable. Just like a modern plug-and-play printer, Windows XP found my printer, and had it printing a test page in mere moments.

When the former wife moved out she of course took her computer with her. We had bought a printer some time ago that she ended up using more often than I had, but when she moved out she left the printer behind. I called her up and asked her why she left it, and she said she thought it was mine, and never really gave it much more thought. I told her to pick it up the next time she came by because she always had used it more than I did, and besides, if I decided to get one for myself I would just pick one up at the thrift store.

Well, this past weekend that's exactly what I did...

When I saw this cutie stashed between a beat up old Cannon BJC-4400, and an Okidata Microline 300, it was love at first sight. The Hewlett Packard 1320 is a fantastic Laserjet printer that retailed around $400.00 before it was discontinued. I rescued this beauty from the thrift store for $5.99! It came with the toner cartridge and a few sheets of paper. My desktop at home includes an ASUS P5GDC Deluxe which of course has a parallel port, so all I had to do was plug in and print!

When I picked up my new 1320 treasure in the back of the thrift store, and turned to head on up to the cashier's, I saw out of the corner of my eye a JVC HR-S3500U Super-VHS tape recorder/player in like-new condition! I couldn't believe my luck..

I have a ton of old family home movies, as well as TV shows etcetera that I copied on VHS that I have been dying to put on DVD for quite a few years. I trashed my own tape machine a several years ago after it ate a tape, and I discovered it would cost more to repair the damn thing than to buy another one. The trouble was, it's very difficult to find a decent VHS player/recorder any more, and whenever I have found one I would like to buy it turns out to be too expensive. I have sorted through hundreds of VHS machines at the thrift store looking for just the right one, but more often than not the pickin's were pretty slim, and I come up empty handed.

This puppy, however, is a great find as far as VHS goes. It's playback capabilities are more than adequate for my needs, and I will be putting in a lot of hours transferring my old tapes in the days to come.

And wouldn't it be nice to add a few creative touches to those videos, for instance, say, some nice titles and maybe even the addition of some background music or narrations? Well, with this little guy, I can....

The Video Studio 500, ladies and gentlemen. This may be the one time I paid too much for something I found at the thrift store. At $24.99, I thought it was probably a good find, and later when I looked for it on-line I discovered it had sold new for around $200.00 or so. However, a quick eBay search turned up a one for 99 cents, but I am still happy with it. Besides, I sure made up for it with all the rest of the cool stuff I bought.

Like I said earlier, the Hewlett Packard 4L printer ended up in my office at work, and most of the rest of the stuff I use at home. The Wollensak reel-to-reel, however, ended up in my office. It's a great conversational piece, and I have several nice tapes to play on it as well. It all helps the day go by a little faster.

Wanted: Music for my Sony TC-440

A month or so ago I shared with you my excitement over finding a Sony, TC-440 reel to reel tape recorder/player. At the time the only tape I had to play on it was the tape that was already on it, but the music on that tape was some really horrible, twangy country music that would make Johnny Cash cry. I was afraid to play it my house for fear of breaking every mirror and piece of glass that I own.

I did have a couple of blank tapes lying around that I had bought a few years ago at a different thrift store, so I immediately set about recording some of my favorite oldtime radio shows so I would have something to play on my wonderful new machine. I really enjoy those old shows, and they are fun to listen to, but they are not the sort of stuff that shows off the capabilities of the tape player.

Like I said, playing my old radio shows on the reel to reel is fun, but I wanted to start buying some prerecorded tapes, and start a real, reel to reel library. (See what I did there? Real? Reel? Huh?) My dad still has quite a few old reel to reel tapes lying around, but I have never been a big
Ray Connif or Burt Bacharach fan. (OK, he does have some Herb Albert and Vince Guaraldi in his collection too, but all of his tapes are out in his hanger, and I think he listens to them when he is out there working on his plane, so he most likely wouldn't want to part with them anyway.) Reel to reel tapes aren't readily available in record stores anymore, hell, RECORD STORES aren't readily available anymore! So where do you turn to when you can't find what you are looking for in all the regular places like your local mall? That's right, eBay.

I have been perusing the music section of eBay for suitable reel to reel tapes that would appeal to my tastes, but I have run into two problems. One problem is that by the time I started developing my own taste in music, which was in the late sixties and seventies, reel to reel tapes were more or less on the way out. So, most of the music I really like was never available on reel to reel tape.

Cassette and 8-Track tape players were developed also around the late sixties and early seventies, and those formats quickly replaced the bulky and bothersome reel to reel. The cassette tape format was especially convenient. It was very compact, which made it easy to store, and the equipment needed to play the tapes was also quite manageable and light weight. You could easily transport your tapes and tape player to wherever you wanted. Could you imagine trying to fit a reel to reel tape player, for instance, into the dash of your car?

By the time Sony came out with the Walkman, in 1979 or so, the reel to reel tapes and tape players had long vanished from store shelves. I am not sure which titles were among the last produced by the big record companies, but I have seen Michael Jackson's Thriller on reel to reel a few times on eBay. And that brings me to my second problem in finding tapes for my player. Prices.

The Michael Jackson Thriller reel to reel tape is currently selling for $76.00 on eBay. Pricey, huh? I will admit to the fact that I enjoy Michael Jackson's music, and that I would pay a pretty penny for that album on reel to reel, but not $76.00. Another copy was just listed on eBay this morning, and I bid $35.00 on it. I am sure I won't win, but at least I tried.

So far the most I have spent on one tape is $45.00 for a copy of The Beatles Revolver

Beatles albums on reel to reel are among the more expensive. But they are not uncommon at all. You can find several Beatles titles on eBay on any given day, however there is enough demand for them that the prices stay fairly high. For some reason I haven't seen a whole lot of Elvis titles for sale. (Presley, not Costello.) I did find one this week, and I bid something like $25.00 on it, but I noticed this morning that I have already been outbid.

On the other hand, I did just spend only $9.99 for a Three Dog Knight album on reel to reel. Like a lot of things on eBay, there are titles out there that aren't prohibitively expensive, but you need to look for them. There is a TON of "easy listening" titles at very low prices, but of course that stuff is like vanilla ice cream at the 31 Flavors ice cream store. It's there, but who cares?

Still, I will probably spend a few bucks on Sinatra and Martin tapes in between my purchases of the more expensive, classic rock titles.

Just another way of throwing around money I don't have.