Dribs & drabs

Posted on by garbagefinds

I reached a minor milestone on eBay recently by getting to 500 feedback. That means I get that cool purple star next to my username instead of the old turquoise one! The next colour is red but I won’t be seeing that for a while.

I had my second major yard sale of the season yesterday. It was pretty busy and I got rid of a lot of stuff, which is great because my storage space was a disaster and I needed the money. I was planning on announcing it here, but I wasn’t able to complete the blog post in time. Sorry!

I finally got around to looking through that collection of photos I found recently. There were a lot of good ones, but I think the most interesting was a series taken in the Yukon during WWII. It seems that someone was stationed there with the RCAF during the war. He also had a bit of time to do some exploring, including visiting some natives communities in the area. Fortunately the photos are well described on the back, thereby preserving a lot of the history that would have been lost otherwise. Zoom in on the pictures for a closer look! I wish I had more time to show you a more in-depth look, I just have too many other things to do.

Last month I went to Ville St-Laurent for heavy garbage day and found some old tools. I know this isn’t the best picture, but if anyone can identify these please let us know in the comments! I think the Eastman Machine tools were part of a fabric cutting machine, so maybe that’s a hint…

I found some neat old magazines in NDG. The coolest (to me) were the official guides for the 1969 & 1970 Montreal Expos, the first two seasons of the ill-fated franchise. Based on eBay’s completed listings I expect the 1969 to sell for about 50$ and the 1970 to go for around 40$.

Unfortunately, this spot didn’t provide much otherwise.

I’ve been having fun in St Michel lately. I picked up that cute end table a couple weeks back and sold it to a friend for 10$. I really like the old chair on the right.

It bears a sticker from St. Mary’s Hospital in Cote-des-Neiges and was probably made in the 1950s. It’s still really sturdy after all these years and should sell for maybe 10$ at a yard sale.

I went back to the chair spot the week after and met the folks doing the tossing. They were clearing out an old house, and offered me some furniture and junk they were looking to get rid of. My favourite piece though was one I saved from the curb, a sort of primitive looking cabinet maybe four and a half feet tall. I’d guess that it was handmade sometime in the 50s or 60s. Does anyone else like this style?

I did take a bit of free stuff, including this huge old mirror. It was in pretty nice condition, and I sold it to a friend for 50$.

I also took a few large pieces of art – I’m a sucker for the amateur stuff. These all sold for 10$ at my yard sale. This hunting scene seems to be signed “H. Jelos.”

I was told that “Peter” sold art door to door many moons ago. Based on the frame, I’d guess this was made in the 70s. It’s an attractive landscape.

This one, another “H. Jelos” features some obvious Christian symbolism.

There was some other nice stuff I would like to have taken, but there was only so much room in the car!

I noticed these bottles on the curb elsewhere in St Michel. The tosser noticed me looking at them and offered me two extra cases, which was nice! He told me that these old Italian Brio bottles were delivered door-to-door around forty years ago. That sounds about right based on the graphic design.

Otherwise, my best find from this Thursday’s run came in Ahuntsic. I spotted a pile of boxes on the curb and went to take a look. Most held nothing of interest, like long expired school textbooks, but one contained a neat old Heathkit AA-32 tube amplifier. From what I read this dates from 1964-1965 and was sold as a kit to be assembled by the user. It’s a pretty cool looking machine and is a fair bit older than most of the other amps I find. From what I can tell, this amp (which is in solid cosmetic condition) sells at around 100$ for parts and 250$ in recently serviced condition. I’ll test mine out and will likely eventually sell it for somewhere between those two amounts.

My haul last week was surprisingly small, outside of some stuff I’ll mention in an upcoming post. Here’s hoping this week is better. Some gold would be nice!

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Email: thingsifindinthegarbage@gmail.com. Staying on top of emails is not my best quality, so please be patient (but feel free to nag).

27 thoughts on “Dribs & drabs”

  1. Hi, in your second photo showing the notes on the back, is it possible to see the photograph to which the note in the upper left refers – the one that mentions mounties. Is it on ebay?

    1. Those are all still in my drawer. Might get them listed at some point, but if I have time I’ll take a look and see which one it is.

      1. I’d appreciate it – my brother, a retired Mountie, would like to see it – thanks

  2. If I were in Canada, that primitive cabinet would be going home with me, chuckle. Love that style! Good picking!

  3. P.S. That color and style, may be 40’s. Hard to tell in the pic.

    1. I think you’re right. Unfortunately it doesn’t show well in that pic but the paint is a lightish green.

  4. That art is amazing!

    Wish I lived closer to I could have poked around your sale.

    You know we can see you in the mirror photo, right? Hehe. 🙂

  5. I love the style of that green and white cabinet! More interesting finds. Your blog is never boring!

  6. The item in the tool photo in the upper left, that looks like a tiny pizza cutter with spikes, appears to be a tracing wheel. Used to transfer sewing pattern markings to fabric.

  8. The tools look like a small lot of sewing tools. The punch next to the tracing wheel that Cyndy describes ( on top of the blue box) is a Pattern Notcher. It’s a tool used in pattern making that creates a notch in a paper pattern. Notches are then used to align all the different pattern pieces. The big black one on the right is a heavy duty pattern punch.

    2. Believe the big black punch is an Antique Boco Rivet Press Tool.

  10. The tool with the round red handle is for tightening banding tape on pallets and the tool next to it is used to crimp the metal clip that will secure the band in place. After it’s crimped, you pull the red handle all the way down and it will cut the end of the banding tape. We called it banding “wire” when I used to work in manufacturing and we would band the pallets of product for shipping.

  11. Hi Martin,

    I encourage you to get in touch with Paul Seesequasis about this bunch of photos, he’s a journalist and artist who works with representations of native communities that typically go unseen.

  12. nothing better with pizza than Brio. or any pasta with sauce but it must be ice cold

  13. The back of the photo, bottom right, is partly captioned ‘Lake Le Barge’ … shades of The Cremation of Sam McGee, by Robert W. Service! 🙂
    “The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
    But the queerest they ever did see
    Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
    I cremated Sam McGee.”

    “I’ve been having fun in St Michel lately.” You are indeed fortunate, Martin … not everyone can honestly claim they “have fun” at their job.

    I’m thinking that “primitive-looking cabinet” is more likely 1930s or 1940s. I’ve seen a few of that “type” around here, and they definitely predated the 1950s.

    I see you in that mirror! Hi Martin. 🙂

    Those tacky frames are 1970s. I remember that kind of painting being sold everywhere, back in the day.

  14. Based on the particular colors, especially the green, I would guess that nifty little cupboard dates from 1920s to 1940s. As for the wartime photos from the Yukon, what a fascinating piece of history. Clearly he was no fan of the Yanks.

  16. I liked the old vintage cupboard. I think form ’40s. The Eastlake tools, I think are from a factory making clothing and bags etc. The pic looks like a fabric cutting machine or used for small specific sewing stitch. Cutting machine would cut many layers of fabric over a large table of 2 x 2 metres maybe. The cutting machine is moved over and around the fabric. If sewing it would be used to do something like a small repetitive stitch of square or crisscross, very strong stitches to hold straps on back pack or similar.

  17. Interesting to read others comments about what they could identify. Seems all the tools paint the picture that they came from a sewing factory that loaded what they had made onto pallets. I agree there is also a tracing wheel… Well done everybody.

  18. Don’t clean the good German silver candle stick. In researching some family pieces and deciding what to keep, sell and give away, all expert advice was leave the cleaning and repairs to the professionals.

  19. The green/beige cabinet might be a “jelly safe” or jelly cabinet.

  20. That primitive cabinet is fabulous! I’d keep it myself as I love the color, but if you want to sell it you could probably put it on Ebay using Uship for shipping (do you have this in Canada?). Either that or perhaps it could go to the auction house you mentioned? It’s lovely and I think it would do well.

  21. Long time lurker here, finally figured out i can comment by logging in to FB. Anyway that tool with the red handle as said above is a band strapping tool for pallets. The Heathkit amplifier is beautiful, would you considering sending it to the UK? When testing make sure you don’t power it up without speakers connected as this can destroy a tube amplifier. I do the same thing as you here in the UK but specialise only in electronics and have people all over London picking up stuff from the streets and I regularly get some amazing stuff but the amount of gold you find is unreal!

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