Surplus/junk mail order places of the day

[wa2ise]

Poly Paks:
The quality of their stuff was rather poor. I'd get the terminal strips... Ordered a few times, once got a refund voucher:

Right...

[centralradio]

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.

[Findm-Keepm]

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.