Friday 4th, Friday Hill recycling center
Rolled leather hammer and cross-peen hammer. 20p.
Sighted a lawnmower sans-engine with exposed drive pulleys. Slightly too burried under a sofa-bed frame to reach or extract. Shame.
Located small bag of bolts. Insigifigant to them, so got for free. Turns out has some welding bits in. Copper rollers, massive earthing braid, some rolled steel pins.. Also two bits of phenolic board held together with wing-nuts. May be a flower-press.
Saturday 5th, Friday Hill recycling center
Arrived 20min from closing. Rushed around and found a silver steel wood auger (7/8″), an octagonal bread plate (matches one I have already), a brass door pull with a fun latch mechanism (should be easy to fix/reproduce), a pair of soft-close drawer runners, a kitchen pot hanging rail, and 4 alloy bike pedals.
On the way home I also found someone chucking out some old bike wheels, one with a Sturmy Archer hub gear. Cleaned up turns out it’s a 1948 Model “AM” gear set. According to Sheldon Brown, that’s a rare type from old British “club bikes”. So will try to sell instead now. May be of use to someone doing an accurate restoration or such.
Alloy pedals aren’t of immediate use. One pair is a high-spec Crank Brothers 5050X set, but very chewed up and missing one of it’s plates (that you don’t seem able to buy separately). The other alloy set is of no current use, one missing it’s spindle. The 5050 seems to use a very short spindle tho, so stripped of the plates and studs (basically grub screws. Handy) I should be able to cut the pedals down to be narrower and use the threaded holes to attatch the “horse legs” to the unicycle cranks on the proposed art-trike.
Sunday 6th, London Hackspace
During the (excellent) party, was informed it was ok for anyone to rummage through the “rubbish” boxes. These are boxes where odds and ends people find and donate are put. If no one takes them in 3 weeks, they go in the skip (and often back out and back into the boxes as someone freshly “discovers” them there).
After a couple of beers, felt comfortable rummaging as others were and found a tiny blacksmiths vice, a robot insect, a usb card reader with no cable (soldered one on while there. Tested at home. Detected, but very broken.), a colour security camera with IR lamp removed, and a tiny 5mm square camera module (probably from a phone. Probably useless, but so cute.).
Will have to fix up the trailer or something. If it’s okay, I have a lot of things that are too good to throw away but that I’ll never use that I could donate to the Hackspace. And probably a number of other things I could happily give on extended loan (like the homebrew equipment).