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Owt for Nowt (Read 105229 times)

DAVETHOMAS90

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Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 04:25:45 pm
Thought this might be worth sharing.

I've done pretty well rescuing various handy items from skips/hedges etc recently. All a bit inspired by an uncle of mine finding a Georgian clock discarded in a skip in London - worth about £4k back in 1975.

The latest haul was particularly handy:



All slightly out of date, but otherwise fine  :boxing:



Been looking for a new vacuum cleaner for a while. I had to repair this one though (from a skip), by taking the tissue paper out of the hose. Really  :shrug:



This is my new coffee machine  ;D Found discarded in a hedge. The casing was a little bent, and I had to buy a new portafilter. It works perfectly, and is a suitable upgrade to my previous machine:



This was also in a skip. I asked the owner why she was throwing it out. She said that she'd lost the manual, and couldn't remember how it worked. Brand new, it was in the box of the new one she'd bought  :no: Makes great coffee too, as I'm hoping Andy will attest to. The Dualit toaster too. One filament (of eight) needs replacing, but otherwise perfect  :thumbsup:



These are just a few of the best ones, but I'm sure there must be some pretty good stories out there.

In one of my "giving up climbing" phases, I dumped every bit of kit, rope access gear etc on prominent display atop a skip in Nether Edge, Sheffield. I'd love to think that someone found that and made good use of it  :2thumbsup:

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#1 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 04:40:03 pm
Top stuff. I've found a champagne flute and a nice little mug at crags and use the latter regularly.

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#2 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 05:02:43 pm
Good effort Dave. Cant say I've got much decent stuff out of skips apart from a drill, 1960's vintage but works great. I love repairing stuff though, clothes, a tent, amplifier and speakers, a wrecked bicycle to name a few. All stuff that I think most people would just throw away. And the upshot is that I rarely have to but anything.

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#3 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 05:03:55 pm
I've got a guitar (in soft case) that someone at the end of the road was slinging out.

Having played quite a bit in my yoof I can see why (its got a very poor action) but if anyone wants it let me know. I was considering leaving it under Griffs/X to go with the ladder :)

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#4 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 05:18:54 pm
Can’t play Stairway To Heaven?

Wood FT

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#5 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 05:26:00 pm
It just beggars belief the stuff people will throw away

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#6 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 06:04:28 pm
It just beggars belief the stuff people will throw away
Just think of the career opportunities you threw away at Rockcity  :lol:
I chucked my 20 year old rack including 15 plus quick draws, cams, wires and grigri in to the skip at Driffield recycling site during the house clear out on my last house move
It might be still there if you are quick.

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#7 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 06:49:52 pm
Throwing out a coffee machine simply because they lost the manual... Boggles the mind! Who even looks at the manual? Good stuff dude.

DAVETHOMAS90

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#8 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 07:23:19 pm
Good effort Dave. Cant say I've got much decent stuff out of skips apart from a drill, 1960's vintage but works great. I love repairing stuff though, clothes, a tent, amplifier and speakers, a wrecked bicycle to name a few. All stuff that I think most people would just throw away. And the upshot is that I rarely have to but anything.

Good stuff.

It's surprising just what you can get by without buying, isn't it? Things often turn up, if you wait long enough.

I have a drill (one of several!) which Ben Moon had left out as "free to take" on his garden wall. Thanks Ben  ;D

Lagers had generously passed on a load of tools after a friend of his passed away (thank you), but I needed some ear defenders so I could use the floor sander. Decided to run down to The Foundry instead.. and picked a pair out of a skip on the way  :)


DAVETHOMAS90

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#9 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 07:27:37 pm
Throwing out a coffee machine simply because they lost the manual... Boggles the mind! Who even looks at the manual? Good stuff dude.

Doesn't it! I find it quite frightening really. And everything has built in obsolescence/self destruction too, doesn't it? My old Zanussi washing machine is 31 years old. Not as old as OMM, but still creaking on  ;)

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#10 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 07:41:08 pm
It just beggars belief the stuff people will throw away
Just think of the career opportunities you threw away at Rockcity  :lol:
I chucked my 20 year old rack including 15 plus quick draws, cams, wires and grigri in to the skip at Driffield recycling site during the house clear out on my last house move
It might be still there if you are quick.

Yeah, just think.... I see there’s a new wall opening that way, old Hull Daily Mail building, interested to see how that goes

Damn, let me know next time  ;)

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#11 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 07:49:55 pm
I once read an article in one of my ex’s art magazines about an artist who’d furnished their entire London flat/ studio by reusing, “up cycling” or just plain old selling the stuff the people in nearby Chelsea left out for the binman- stuff that the rest of us would save up for months to pay for was just discarded by the super rich as soon as they got a replacement and this bloke’s entire livelihood was built around reusing it in one way or another. I was inspired by that but it was my Dad who put me onto salvaging unwanted stuff and repairing it. He was an electronic engineer and would always emphasise to me how little it took to fix electronics that were considered broken.

I got an Akai S01 (an old school rackmount sampler) out of one of the skips behind my old flat. It was 15 years old even then but still had the protective film on the screen. Walking past I thought “there’s no way that’s an Akai sampler, I’ve just got studio hardware on the brain” but sure enough it was. A lot of the various versions of my home studio were built around furniture I’d pulled out of skips but that’s the only time an actual piece of musical equipment was sourced that way.

I had quite a lot of 70s hi-fi  gear that was going to be skipped from my work once. Wood for Trees and BBGuns have both ended up with some of that.

A hi-fi shop under my old flat went bust too and had a skip which superficially seemed full of only shopfitting stuff but on further investigation had loads of unused remote controls etc. for posh hi-fis still in their boxes. I made hundreds selling that stuff on eBay.

Having said all this though, in living in a flat above a row of shops I got to see the darker side of this sort of thing- there are clearly people who are obsessed beyond reason with it. Two of the shops were charity shops so everything in their skips was stuff they couldn’t sell in the shops- dirty clothes, broken toys, VHS tapes etc. Every single day there would be people digging through these skips, bringing their own steps and torches etc. and leaving anything they didn’t want on the floor around them. I’m talking people who’d park their cars up (sometimes with bored family members in them- I saw this happen on Christmas Eve) before getting to work, not desperate people doing it to survive. So although it kind of contradicts what I’ve said, there’s definitely something to be said for not getting carried away with it!

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#12 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 07:51:27 pm
It just beggars belief the stuff people will throw away
Just think of the career opportunities you threw away at Rockcity  :lol:
I chucked my 20 year old rack including 15 plus quick draws, cams, wires and grigri in to the skip at Driffield recycling site during the house clear out on my last house move
It might be still there if you are quick.

Yeah, just think.... I see there’s a new wall opening that way, old Hull Daily Mail building, interested to see how that goes

Damn, let me know next time  ;)

New wall? Hull? Wtf? For real? Mark not part of it?

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#13 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 07:55:48 pm
It just beggars belief the stuff people will throw away
Just think of the career opportunities you threw away at Rockcity  :lol:
I chucked my 20 year old rack including 15 plus quick draws, cams, wires and grigri in to the skip at Driffield recycling site during the house clear out on my last house move
It might be still there if you are quick.

Yeah, just think.... I see there’s a new wall opening that way, old Hull Daily Mail building, interested to see how that goes

Damn, let me know next time  ;)

New wall? Hull? Wtf? For real? Mark not part of it?
Come on Guy what do you know.

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SamT

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#15 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 08:55:53 pm

Just spent a satisfying couple of hours completely disassembling and re-assembing my sons phone to replace the totally smashed screen on it.  The replacement screen cost £21 quid on ebay and the how to You Tube vid was about half an hour long, but all went well and it now looks brand new.

#feelingsmug

I'm a right skip dog, and will always have a bit of a neb.  I got a set of galvanised metal ladder out of a skip at the Uni when they were building 'The Commons' (with the permission of the site manager, since it was a bit obvious in the middle of the site).  They were exactly what we were looking for at our caving club for our tackle store.

It is staggering just how much stuff gets binned.

We're in the process of moving/house renovations.  A lot of stuff went to charity. Bit on Gum Tree etc and I'm afraid, some stuff did end up in a skip that was probably serviceable.  Couple of lampshades spring to mind (they were a bit mank tbh).

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#16 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 09:32:59 pm
Nice one Sam. This last year I’ve done 4 iPhone screens - three batteries and a home button replacement.... got it down to 5-10 min now.. and it’s great to get something fixed for very little (that folk think costs £££)

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#17 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 10:31:19 pm
Good thread, love a bit of repair. Just ordered a replacement screen for my phone, hopefully all will go well!

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#18 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 14, 2018, 10:44:45 pm
I opted for the full replacement option, as opposed to the 'hair dryer, peeling off the epoxy with a razor' option, which is cheaper, but looks very hit and miss.

I've repaired loads of stuff like this in the pass.  I was particularly proud of fixing my dads hoover, where the on off button had broken, but managed to bend a small bit of metal into the correct shape and pop rivet it back into place. Good as new and you'd never know. 

It does help to have the right tools, and a garage full of junk that 'well you never know, it might come in'.


DAVETHOMAS90

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#19 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 15, 2018, 02:03:53 am
Great info there about the phone screen Sam. I'll have to check that out.

I meant to say at the start of the thread "Generous donations of free stuff by SamT and others is cheating, but very much appreciated"  :thumbsup:


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#20 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 15, 2018, 08:30:23 am
I am constantly building things out of junk and try to repair everything myself. This isn’t surprising/fair comparison because that’s the basic job description of a sea-going Marine Engineer, who would be expected to fix anything from a radar to a sewage treatment plant, with a stick of gum and a paper clip (Araldite! What can’t be fixed with that stuff! Solder/weld replacement, cast into a new component (with plasticine molds), and if that fails Duct tape the shit out of it).

However, on a more practical note.
Running a climbing wall, means people keep donating random holds from odd sources.
We set in coloured circuits, so we usually can’t use them, unless they happen to colour match an existing set.
But, if you pick up the permanent marker refill bottles (couple of quid from amazon), you can stain any resin hold. Obviously, it helps to use a dark colour. I have created a 120 hold set in black, like this. Dishwasher and pressure washer don’t touch the colour, even after six years of washing (don’t use Benky).

I also created a load of dual texture holds (specifically for young children), by coating part of the holds with tile paint. They have been up for a couple months now and survived a wash cycle, so it’s looking durable.
 

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#21 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 15, 2018, 10:41:04 am
I once spotted a rope in a black bin across the road from me in Nether Edge. I pulled it it and it was a fairly wiry, skinny, dark blue sport rope but it had been chopped in two. I used both bits for sport climbing in the Peak for about a year. They were a nice length for shorter stuff.

The bin, and I therefore believe the rope, was yours, Dave.

You wasteful bastard, had you lost the manual?

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#22 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 15, 2018, 10:58:59 am
 :lol:

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#23 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 15, 2018, 01:27:53 pm
Bravo Grimer. Post of the year.

DAVETHOMAS90

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#24 Re: Owt for Nowt
October 15, 2018, 07:06:33 pm
Ha ha  ;D

Could have been anyone's at the time Grimer, with a lot of folk staying. That would have been a while ago, hey.
My new Dyson has a nice long reach for the walls too  ;)

Some good stories here.

As an aside, I've set up a Gumtree page to sell items, raising funds for the Sheffield Tree campaign/legal fund.
If anyone has anything they'd like to sell, with a proportion of sale price donated to the fund, drop me a line.

 

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