Auction Hunters: Season 2, Episode 12: “Top Gun Ton.”
Allen and Ton drove to Ontario California. The storage facility there were headed to only holds one auction a year, so there were 26 units up for sale and a lot of people.
The Haff-Ton team jumped right into the bidding and won the first unit. After that, Allen and Ton held off, not seeing anything they wanted right up until the final unit. Since they hadn’t bid on anything else, they still had plenty of money and were able to go higher than the others who’d been bidding all day, and they won the last unit.
Dusty Unit
The guys paid $450 for 
a large unit full of dusty old boxes. Dust promised old and old usually means good money.
They found one of the first army cellphones, called a Handie Talkie, worth $80 as well as two clock radios from the 1950’s worth $60.
Fact: “Handie Talkies” were developed in WWII replaced the back mounted “Walkie Talkies”
After Allen took a leaf blower to the dust to clear things up, they found more antiques
: an old box camera worth $30 and an early Polaroid camera with a value of $60.
Fact: The first permanent photograph was made in 1827 using a sliding wooden box camera.
Then they uncovered a 100 year old studio camera.
They took all the cameras to Eric, a camera expert. While he wasn’t very interested by the
others, he was impressed by the studio camera. He said it was an old Korona, made by Gundlach and had all the original pieces.
Fact: Gundlach made lenses before acquiring the Milburn Korona camera company in 1896.
The light grey green color of the bellows was also very rare, as most of them were black or red. He dated the camera between 1910 and 1930, and said it was also the kind press photographers would use.
To test if the shutter would still work, Allen and Ton did a little modeling and the pictures came out great.
Since the camera was still working, Eric paid them $525 for the all the whole lot.
R.C. Unit
Ton got excited at the last unit, when he spotted what looked
like remote control car parts. The guys paid $1300 for the unit and then started digging through all the boxes. At first the contents all seemed pretty worthless, until Ton found an R.C. car worth $200.
Then they found a small remote controlled yellow jet.
After reaching the back of the unit Ton found a tarp covered item. He lifted it and found an even larger R.C. jet.
They took the two jets to Billy, an R.C. jet expert. He wasn’t interested in the
yellow one, saying it was just a toy, but the bigger one really impressed him.
Fact: Some R.C. jet motors run on the same jet fuel as commercial airliners.
He said it was a Sky Master Fighter Jet, an actual scale model of a real Viper Jet. He checked the motor and found there was a $4000 piece of equipment inside.
Fact: The real Viper Jet can be purchased by civilians and costs over $2.5 million.
It was still no guarantee that it would fly though, and it wouldn’t be worth anything grounded. They had to try it out and Ton wanted to give it a spin. Billy definitely wasn’t so sure that was a good idea and started him out on the yellow jet first.
Fact: Beginner R.C. jets can fly as fast as 120 MPH.
Billy turned out to be right when the plane crashed and burned under Ton’s watch. Crashing that plane lost the Haff-Ton team $600.
Billy wisely took over the flying for the Viper Jet. It flew beautifully and landed without a hitch.
Billy bought the jet from them for $9000.
Ton might have crashed and burn one plane that day, but the guys were soaring high after two great units!
Auction Total:
Paid $1750
Sold: $10825
Profit: $8475
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