Most amazing dumpster dive ever!!!!

[GK]

Some of my freebie iron, which I've been testing this evening. The baby of the three is a medical grade (salvaged from medical equiptment) 1900VA toroid, 240Vpri / 115Vsec with an electrostatic screen. Just what I need for powering my American test equiptment. Yahoo. I'll be putting this one into my power rack for the 115V distribution.
The other two transformers are a pair of single-phase, 240Vpri / 2150Vsec of a slightly higher power rating, which I'm about to clean up and install into a couple of Broadcast HF transmitters that I'm converting to single-phase, that use multiple 4CX1000A's with 3kV on the plate. I do the filtering with some decent chokes and a string of 400VDC electrolytics. These can give you a bit of a tickle.

[jackinnj]

Originally Posted by GK

These can give you a bit of a tickle.

The prior denizens of our ham radio station at high school had used the power supply and carcase of a broadcast transmitter -- I think that they used a DX35 and SB10 as the exciter/ssb generator -- to get rid of the tickle they had a discharge rod made of phenolic resin. The filter caps were only a few mmf, high voltage probably leaking PCB's.

[ikoflexer]

Transformers eh? I recently scored something good too, a 2400V transformer, 5KVA, just what I needed for my next power triode project

My other good find was a mass spectrometer, choke-full of instrumentation opamps and adcs, a fully functional tube Boonton capacitance bridge, a portable gas analyzer (don't know what to do with that), and some other small things. What can I say, my first choice would be a military dumpster, but for lack of that I'll just settle for the university dumpster.

[brianco]

My 'best' dive was two ford estste cars full of 1/4" copy master tapes (insurance copies) dumpstered by an international UK studio. The haul included mono tapes from the 1950s!! along with some truly hot collectors stuff!

[Zen Mod]

Originally Posted by brianco

My 'best' dive was two ford estste cars full of 1/4" copy master tapes (insurance copies) dumpstered by an international UK studio. The haul included mono tapes from the 1950s!! along with some truly hot collectors stuff!

well ....... this thread simply sucks ..........

[jackinnj]

This is encouraging me to go down there this afternoon.

Penn State and Carnegie Mellon stopped throwing stuff out -- they now sell via EBay.

[ikoflexer]

We have a so called surplus swap shop and the policy is to put all the stuff people don't need in there, the reason being that University staff would get priority in buying it for a few bucks. The trouble is that only furniture makes it to the shop. When I asked about electrical devices of any kind the guy looked at me surprised and said: "we don't even get that, nobody wants it, we leave it at the dump site" (meaning each department has their own little dump area). So, there, we're way behind CMU and Penn State

[jackinnj]

I bid on a reflow oven which Penn State had for sale last year, thought I could get it on the cheap -- so such luck.

[EBM_dude]

We usually dig up cool stuff from the dumpster others throw away at the uni. It gets reused for constructing all kinds of fancy apparatus. Even if it's only a casing for putting in stuff we use to drive our lasers with.
Today we cannibalized an old Tektronix oscilloscope. The leftovers were to be dumped. They contained a cool 17-0-17 trafo that I kept. It may power my next TDA2030 amp.
The most amazíng thing we found was an electron microscope. We wanted to fix it but decided against it yesterday.

[GK]

Originally Posted by jackinnj

The prior denizens of our ham radio station at high school had used the power supply and carcase of a broadcast transmitter -- I think that they used a DX35 and SB10 as the exciter/ssb generator -- to get rid of the tickle they had a discharge rod made of phenolic resin. The filter caps were only a few mmf, high voltage probably leaking PCB's.

I use bleeder resistors. Modern HV electrolytics in series are the way to go. The bleeder resistors also ensure voltage sharing (in parallel with each cap).
I'm slowly substituting all my PCB filled caps and making a pile for the EPA.