Not anything expensive like a house or car .
My father in law liked to tinker. A local hardware store was closing. So he bought their entire supply of nuts, bolts, screws, etc. Thousands of them. When he died his other daughter got the house so I don’t know what she did , probably threw them all out
I recently bought a “pre-owned” 3.5 inch floppy disk drive from a word processor off of eBay so I could install the worm-screw reader head mechanism into a 35 year old electronic musical device. Success; it works!
Cool ! What is it ?
I don’t think most of the strange things bought by people I know count, as they were mostly bought as presents for me.
My sister did buy a set of large, steampunk gear mirrors though.
I’m glad you asked! The ancient device is a dedicated sequencer (it records performance information which you can modify and store to floppy disk for later playback – it will “play,” for example, a synthesizer live while you play something else simultaneously.). The Brother company made sequencers for a short time back in the late '80s and I bought two of the same model for a one-man-band set-up and they have worked non-stop with no problem – except having to change the belts ONE TIME five years ago – ever since until recently when the one worm-screw reader head transport gave up the ghost. An eBay seller had a Brother word processor whose disk drive had the EXACT SAME transport mechanism. A quick purchase, a little surgery, a test toast, and all’s right with the world. Support the Brother company whenever you can, IMHO they deserve it!
OP: I apologize for the lengthy sidebar.
I saw an interview of Alex Trebek a few years ago and he did the same thing. He liked to tinker around the house and do home improvements.
One of my sister’s got made fun of for having big feet once in middle school so now for the rest of her life she will buy two pairs of shoes, her size and one two sizes too small, then she will put the bigger shoes in the smaller box just so they say the smaller number on the side. It would make a lot more sense if she sold the smaller shoes though but instead she literally just throws them into one of her closets so there’s an entire closet full of shoes she can’t wear in her house. I keep telling her to sell them on eBay but she refuses.
I have obtained a number of strange things for free. Buying something strange not so much, but I do have a 45 ft. roller conveyor I bought from Toys ‘R’ Us when they were going out of business. I also bought an aisle of shelving but I’m using that to store stuff so doesn’t seem strange, and I bought a genuine Toys ‘R’ Us hand truck also, but I use that to move things so I also wouldn’t call it strange although most people don’t have an iconic picture of a giraffe on their hand truck. But its the roller conveyor that would seem strange to people.
Other stuff, just not that much strange. We have a 16 ft. canoe that we keep as a beer cooler for parties. Everybody wants to come see the boat full of beer. I guess that seems strange but a lot of
people buy a canoe to take out on the water no more often than we throw parties.
There has to be more, I’m a strange person, I have to remember all those times people asked me “Why do you own a …?”
That reminds me of the thirty or forty feet of store shelving in my parents’ house, though they didn’t buy it. My brother was working for a Wawa convenience store in Connecticut when he called them to let them know that the store was being remodeled, the shelving replaced and the old shelves were left in the back to be disposed of. So they acquired it and now it’s in the basement and garage.
Nice. My brother (!) had one of those (or similar) around then too…
(wonder if my SIL still has it …)
A friend of mine bought a used CRT computer monitor from a university surplus sale. It was huge for a CRT computer monitor (almost 40"? I forget) and hugely heavy! Who knows how many thousands of dollars it would have cost new, but he paid $20 or something like that.
Since people are posting things they got for free, I once found a bird shaped whistle.
If we’re gonna talk about free things I had about 50 mining lamps. Not those little things miners wear on their hats, I’m talking about mining lamps, designed to illuminate mines. Big hunks of 3/4" steel and explosion proof glass. The small ones weighed 35-40 lbs. The biggest ones weighed 75 lbs. For free stuff collectors this was the motherlode. Over the years I gave them all away. You might not realize it right off the bat but there is a limited set of uses for giant mining lamps that are actually worth the time and effort to do.
Wouldn’t surprise me if the electronics part of it still works, especially if it was from a big name company. It seems the mechanical parts (switches/buttons, belts, disk drive working parts) are what break down first and good luck finding replacement parts. Let me know if SIL still has it and if it works (or at least turns on), would you please? TIA.
As a library volunteer, and a Habitat ReStore volunteer before that, it never fails to amaze me what does (or doesn’t) sell. More than once, we would look at a donation and think, “Who’s going to want this?” and the next person comes in looking for it, while brand-new things in the shrinkwrap, or current best-sellers, go nowhere.
My brother found incandescent light bulbs at his local ReStore for 1 cent each, so he bought out their stock. He paid $2 and change for them, IIRC. He also found out very quickly why they were priced at 1 cent each; they must have been a defective batch, and most of them burned out after just a few hours of use.
I married a person who likes to buy strange things at thrift stores. These are two recent objects that entered the house.
One is a handmade Tardis replica. The other was described as a paper mache faun, but I’m pretty sure it’s Baphomet.
