Arkay
Lunatic Member
Today I was going around some antique and junk shops in an neighborhood near where I used to live.
There is a lady there who performs cleaning services for buildings, whose husband used to have a stall there. I've known them both for probably 15-20 years, as she was the cleaner in the building I lived in, and I've bought stuff (most recently, LPs and Laserdisks) from him for years. Sadly, he passed away several months ago.
Today the lady was just opening a door in a back alley, where I know she keeps stuff gleaned from the discards of the places she cleans, that she sells "on the street" when she has time. The door opens onto a small closet-sized space with stairs going up, and for all the years I've seen it, it looked blocked up with her "junk".
This time, for the first time, she invited me to take a look INSIDE ... up the stairs! It took her a minute or two to clear out enough junk that a narrow path along one side of the stairs could be navigated. She went up, and from the bottom steps I could just make out a dim sense of a bunch of stuff piled up along the walls of a room of sorts at the top of the stairs.
I asked if there was any decent light to see things by, and soon she was telling someone to turn on the lights. But there was no one there, and she wasn't using a phone!
Turns out that the room is the back part of a larger unit, and wooden partition walls between the rooms on the other side (which she rents out) and the hidden storage room behind them was thin enough for the occupants on the other side to hear, and switch on the lights!
I have to turn sideways to get past the old light fixtures and stuff that line half the staircase, but I make it to the top and into the room.
The first thing I see, at the top of the stairs is a bunch of boomboxes. Unfortunately, none of them are rare or collectible. I'll pass on those.
There are bunk-beds along two walls, stacked high with junk. Boxes and miscellaneous stuff is stacked around on the floor, and there isn't much room. A good-sized wooden ship model catches my eye, but there is more. I step over some stuff and start looking at what is on the first bunk-bed.
Fans! Antique and vintage desk fans. Lots of them. GE, Westinghouse, larger and smaller. The bottom bunk bed contains... More fans! There are a couple of the old 1920s style cast-iron ones right in front, with the handles on top and the smaller motor housings jutting out in back. There are art-deco ones with 'flow lines'. There are bulbous 1950s rounded half-football ones. I quick-count at least 17 or 18 desk fans right in front of me, and I can detect there are a few more tucked behind other things.
Many of them do not have the fan blades and surround cages on them. But on one side, there is a pile of cages with a few blades. There are two boxes on the other side, one visibly packed with fan blades, but unfortunately they look mostly newer. I lift down the top box to look inside. It is packed with older/antique fan blades, both plastic and early riveted-metal ones.
The lady then explains that her husband had repaired fans years ago, but demand for repair services had disappeared some years ago, with the rise of "disposable" plastic ones. He would occasionally refurbish one of these fans for sale, but basically just accumulated them and left them there in the store-room.
All the spare parts, she said, were "on the bottom". She pulls a cardboard box out from under the bottom bunk. It is filled with about a dozen metal cookie tins. I open a few of them. They are packed with bearings, bushings, switches, screws --all the parts you'd need to restore old fans. She pulls out a metal toolbox, filled with his repair tools. Then another, crammed with mostly wrenches. Then another box of parts. As she is doing this, she is saying, "There are a LOT here, a lot... and as I bend down and look under the bed, I realize she is right: there are several more boxes full of parts and a couple more toolboxes are underneath therem too. Clearly, there is MORE than one would need to restore all the actual fans in sight, with many repair parts to spare.
She said that she'd shown the lode to a couple of people already, but they all wanted "just this fan" or "just that part". She wants to clear out the whole batch in one fell swoop, rather than sell them piecemeal, as she is paying rent on the whole place. If she clears the junk side out, she can sub-rent the bed-spaces, as she is doing with the rooms on the other side of the partition. So she has an incentive to sell the fans cheaply, if someone will take them all at once at a lump-sum price. Her cleaning income is irregular and not so high, and without the income her husband was providing, it seems she is under some pressure to improve things. People are not really buying "junk stuff" in the current economy, unless it is particularly nice and rare. So she said she'd sell the whole bunch to me, cheaply, if I'd take the whole batch, including all the tools and all the spare parts.
This is tough. I'd LOVE to have a few of those fans, esp. the old 1920s ones with the handles - I love those! I do know how to restore them myself, but don't really have the time to take on so many, nor do I really want that many fans.
I know another fan repair guy, who has been very nice and helpful to me in the past, when I've been restoring some fans and looking for hard-to-find bits or wasn't sure what lubricant to use. The guy reminds me of some of the techs here; he loves the old fans, and is happy to share his knowledge and expertise to help keep the old fans going, even if it isn't making him any money. Extremely unusual attitude, for a Chinese!
I'm thinking of picking out three or four fans --maybe one representative of each decade/style movement-- that I want to restore myself, and flipping the rest to him cheaply, to get my money back. The parts are far more likely to be of use keeping gear alive in his hands, than in mine, where they would mostly continue to langour unused in the boxes. I have very limited space for storage, anyway, and enough other projects on hand right now.
I'll make time within the coming few days to sound him out on whether he is interested, and I'll have to come up with a price figure to offer the woman. I hope hwer expectations of prices are realistic. I don't mind paying fair value for what they are (wholly unrestored and mostly partially disassembled, with fan blades and cages removed), at a bulk-buy price, but I'm not sure is she knows what that kind of value is.
Actually, I'm not sure I know, either! LOL
On the good side, my wife is out of town for the next 8 days, so I may have time to bring these home and sort through them and sell off some (or give some away) to the nice guy, before she comes back. I might even see if he'd restore a few for me, in return for my just giving him the lot (depending on what I have to pay for them all, and what they turn out to be worth: I'll research the individual models when I can).
Anyway, I know "this thread needs pics", but I didn't have a camera with me, sorry!
Any other vintage-fan find stories? Any tips on negotiating/dealing with this opportunity?
There is a lady there who performs cleaning services for buildings, whose husband used to have a stall there. I've known them both for probably 15-20 years, as she was the cleaner in the building I lived in, and I've bought stuff (most recently, LPs and Laserdisks) from him for years. Sadly, he passed away several months ago.
Today the lady was just opening a door in a back alley, where I know she keeps stuff gleaned from the discards of the places she cleans, that she sells "on the street" when she has time. The door opens onto a small closet-sized space with stairs going up, and for all the years I've seen it, it looked blocked up with her "junk".
This time, for the first time, she invited me to take a look INSIDE ... up the stairs! It took her a minute or two to clear out enough junk that a narrow path along one side of the stairs could be navigated. She went up, and from the bottom steps I could just make out a dim sense of a bunch of stuff piled up along the walls of a room of sorts at the top of the stairs.
I asked if there was any decent light to see things by, and soon she was telling someone to turn on the lights. But there was no one there, and she wasn't using a phone!
Turns out that the room is the back part of a larger unit, and wooden partition walls between the rooms on the other side (which she rents out) and the hidden storage room behind them was thin enough for the occupants on the other side to hear, and switch on the lights!
I have to turn sideways to get past the old light fixtures and stuff that line half the staircase, but I make it to the top and into the room.
The first thing I see, at the top of the stairs is a bunch of boomboxes. Unfortunately, none of them are rare or collectible. I'll pass on those.
There are bunk-beds along two walls, stacked high with junk. Boxes and miscellaneous stuff is stacked around on the floor, and there isn't much room. A good-sized wooden ship model catches my eye, but there is more. I step over some stuff and start looking at what is on the first bunk-bed.
Fans! Antique and vintage desk fans. Lots of them. GE, Westinghouse, larger and smaller. The bottom bunk bed contains... More fans! There are a couple of the old 1920s style cast-iron ones right in front, with the handles on top and the smaller motor housings jutting out in back. There are art-deco ones with 'flow lines'. There are bulbous 1950s rounded half-football ones. I quick-count at least 17 or 18 desk fans right in front of me, and I can detect there are a few more tucked behind other things.
Many of them do not have the fan blades and surround cages on them. But on one side, there is a pile of cages with a few blades. There are two boxes on the other side, one visibly packed with fan blades, but unfortunately they look mostly newer. I lift down the top box to look inside. It is packed with older/antique fan blades, both plastic and early riveted-metal ones.
The lady then explains that her husband had repaired fans years ago, but demand for repair services had disappeared some years ago, with the rise of "disposable" plastic ones. He would occasionally refurbish one of these fans for sale, but basically just accumulated them and left them there in the store-room.
All the spare parts, she said, were "on the bottom". She pulls a cardboard box out from under the bottom bunk. It is filled with about a dozen metal cookie tins. I open a few of them. They are packed with bearings, bushings, switches, screws --all the parts you'd need to restore old fans. She pulls out a metal toolbox, filled with his repair tools. Then another, crammed with mostly wrenches. Then another box of parts. As she is doing this, she is saying, "There are a LOT here, a lot... and as I bend down and look under the bed, I realize she is right: there are several more boxes full of parts and a couple more toolboxes are underneath therem too. Clearly, there is MORE than one would need to restore all the actual fans in sight, with many repair parts to spare.
She said that she'd shown the lode to a couple of people already, but they all wanted "just this fan" or "just that part". She wants to clear out the whole batch in one fell swoop, rather than sell them piecemeal, as she is paying rent on the whole place. If she clears the junk side out, she can sub-rent the bed-spaces, as she is doing with the rooms on the other side of the partition. So she has an incentive to sell the fans cheaply, if someone will take them all at once at a lump-sum price. Her cleaning income is irregular and not so high, and without the income her husband was providing, it seems she is under some pressure to improve things. People are not really buying "junk stuff" in the current economy, unless it is particularly nice and rare. So she said she'd sell the whole bunch to me, cheaply, if I'd take the whole batch, including all the tools and all the spare parts.
This is tough. I'd LOVE to have a few of those fans, esp. the old 1920s ones with the handles - I love those! I do know how to restore them myself, but don't really have the time to take on so many, nor do I really want that many fans.
I know another fan repair guy, who has been very nice and helpful to me in the past, when I've been restoring some fans and looking for hard-to-find bits or wasn't sure what lubricant to use. The guy reminds me of some of the techs here; he loves the old fans, and is happy to share his knowledge and expertise to help keep the old fans going, even if it isn't making him any money. Extremely unusual attitude, for a Chinese!
I'm thinking of picking out three or four fans --maybe one representative of each decade/style movement-- that I want to restore myself, and flipping the rest to him cheaply, to get my money back. The parts are far more likely to be of use keeping gear alive in his hands, than in mine, where they would mostly continue to langour unused in the boxes. I have very limited space for storage, anyway, and enough other projects on hand right now.
I'll make time within the coming few days to sound him out on whether he is interested, and I'll have to come up with a price figure to offer the woman. I hope hwer expectations of prices are realistic. I don't mind paying fair value for what they are (wholly unrestored and mostly partially disassembled, with fan blades and cages removed), at a bulk-buy price, but I'm not sure is she knows what that kind of value is.
Actually, I'm not sure I know, either! LOL
On the good side, my wife is out of town for the next 8 days, so I may have time to bring these home and sort through them and sell off some (or give some away) to the nice guy, before she comes back. I might even see if he'd restore a few for me, in return for my just giving him the lot (depending on what I have to pay for them all, and what they turn out to be worth: I'll research the individual models when I can).
Anyway, I know "this thread needs pics", but I didn't have a camera with me, sorry!
Any other vintage-fan find stories? Any tips on negotiating/dealing with this opportunity?
