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Anyone know a way to find stores in other areas with this kind of spirit? Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale used to feel a bit like this to me.
The Reuseum in Garden City, ID https://www.reuseum.com/
Completely flabbergasted to see one of my favorite stores of all time at the top of HN. This place is an absolute gem and I have countless childhood memories of visiting the Milwaukee Av location. Heartbroken to see they’re in financial distress. If there’s any store worth saving it’s this one.
I ordered motors and pumps from that catalog as a kid. Can you imagine I used to love going through the stuff they had on a paper catalog!
Like you said, so many motors and switches; likely a big part of the reason I do what I do for a living today.
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Scored a lot of Lindsay's books when you still could (lot of build-your-own regenerative receivers and similar, reprints of "The Boy Mechanic", "5 Acres and Independence", etc.). I would suspect (hope) many have been "archived" at "the org". (EDIT: I see for example "The Impoverished Radio Experimenter Vol. 4": https://archive.org/details/impoverishedradi0000lind/mode/2u... )
This is a great recommendation, thanks! I've found a lot of interesting old radio hobbyist magazines on the Archive, whose copyright has expired. While it's great to see how people could get stuff done with the very limited electrical resources available in the 01910s and 01920s, many of the designs depend on materials that are now hard to find, while materials that are now easy to find (like PN2222s) didn't exist.
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I like these places too but I can see why they are dying. The number of SKUs people want has exploded and the cost competition from buying online is unreal. Recently I needed a motor driver in a hurry (a4988 or equivalent) and decided to visit my local electronics shop. They wanted $9 for it (plus tax), which I was willing to pay, but were out of stock. So I went home and found a 5 pack of the exact same part for abo…
This is a benefit of having ultra dense industry specific zones like the Shenzhen SEZ. Physical vendors get the volume to warrant operating and reasonable pricing, buyers get components on short notice. Suburbanization set up the US for failure here, and the governments haven't bothered intentionally creating any equivalent of Shenzhen. Santa Clara county used to be the spot, and I'd regularly pick up quickturn PCBs…
It's cheaper to buy the new stuff from Shenzhen than the old stuff.
Completely flabbergasted to see one of my favorite stores of all time at the top of HN. This place is an absolute gem and I have countless childhood memories of visiting the Milwaukee Av location. Heartbroken to see they’re in financial distress. If there’s any store worth saving it’s this one.
saveitforparts on YouTube did an excellent tour/example video of ax-man [1] which gives a good idea of the type of store ASS is and the vibe. Even if you aren't local to the upper Midwest, I'd highly recommend donating to keep this store alive. It very much fits with the old-school hacker ethos, and keeping spaces like this alive helps preserve that culture and exposes younger people to the idea of DIY/punk/hacker and the ability to repurpose old/interesting stuff.
Side note, I'm surprised that these types of scientific surplus stores have lasted longer in the upper Midwest than places like silicon valley or near bell labs in NJ. They aren't open for retail anymore and didn't have the same sense of humor, but Surplus Sales of Nebraska [2] is also an excellent example from this area of the country. I hadn't ordered since last year, they had held on to a delightful web 1.0 site up until sometime in the last year and are a legit supplier for really oddball stuff.
[0] https://www.ax-man.com/pages/the-nature-of-surplus
It's a pity they don't ship to other countries than the US. I looked through their website and saw some fun stuff, but no international shipping.
I've consulted for similar size businesses, and shipping integration was always the reason to not support international shipments. Send them an email, you'll almost certainly hear back from a real person and if you let them know what you want to order they can probably make it happen.