Surplus/junk mail order places of the day
 

Poly Paks: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4029/...f5a450c0_o.jpg
The quality of their stuff was rather poor. I'd get the terminal strips... Ordered a few times, once got a refund voucher:
http://www.wa2ise.com/radios/polypaksrefund.jpg
Right...

Oh yea .Poly Paks.I still see stuff over here from them.I always said they raided all the dumpsters all over New England as companies dump their floor scrapping in the trash . Get anybody with a shrinkwrap machine .You are in. There were others like BNF,All Electronics,Babylon electronics,Formula International,Olsen,Jameco electronics which I never got anything from.Probably others I forgot about.I forgot the scientific surplus company name but my late friend always bought stuff from there since they had good stuff there.

Meshna, Meshna, Meshna.....Lynn, Mass. I loved their stuff. In the 70s, they sent out a newsprint catalog every month, with only the outer pages having new stuff. Cool high-tech, along with low tech at low prices. Always quality. Tons of TTL and early digital stuff. I never figured out the connection to industry, as their selection was pretty wide.

Pre-WTC Radio Row places with flybacks for 1 dollar were cool too. One of them had a salesman that drove a station wagon up and down the Mid-Atlantic coast selling high usage stuff, cheap. 80uf/450V caps - 8 for a buck, and unbranded 6GH8As, a sleeve for $4. Dad got replacement bulbs, caps and fuses from the guy, typical purchase was 10 dollars or so. He'd hit 10 shops in a day, get up the next day, and do the same. Two weeks of travel, and he'd clear 3 grand. Almo out of Baltimore also had a similar sales setup.

Here, we had Grand Junquection - cool, old stuff with lots of military crap added in. Sadly, they closed in 1999 or so. I bought a 2V@450A DC power supply there for $6 - and welded two combination wrenches to one another! It also melted a 50' roll of coax - yeah, I got stupid with it.

My favorite today is BG Micro in Texas - they have a print catalog that is better than their website. Second would be Electronics Goldmine, but the shipping is quite high to us in the east. I make one or two purchases a year, mostly HV caps.