Piece by Piece Auction...A failure....and A success

Did no good at a piece-by-piece auction on Thursday, July 25, 2013 but I did make a good buy at another auction of that type.

I bought a 4x4x4 container (open on the top) of miscellaneous items. I saw one item I was interested in…the rest was mystery items and they were not visible. The whole box cost $10.

The place provides a dumpster and I was filling it up pretty quickly. I got about 12 total items I thought were sellable.  One in particulare (buried in the middle of the box) came out well.

It was a plastic ziplock type bag about 9 x 12 with visible USA postage stamps (new) showing. Bag was thick too, so if the rest were like that I knew there would be some value there.

Got it home, spent maybe an hour sorting by denomination. Most pieces were 3s, 4s or 8s of a single stamp, but there were a fair number of singles too. Anyway, after putting the quantities and denominations into a spreadsheet the total came out to $130 and some cents!  Not bad for the $10 investment, plus the other items to sell too....and a lot of junk thrown away.

I have a friend who mails to Canada on a regular basis (they need postage with numbers on them, not “forever” stamps) so I may discount some of that to her, but still $100 plus is ok with me.

This auction held a lot of promise. There were 40 lockers scheduled...20 at auction time. Still a good number.

Auction started at 8:30 and I drove out the gate at 4:15....almost 8 hours of watching stuff come out in boxes or individual pieces. The first 15 or so lockers weren't great to say the least. Finally a few good lockers came up.

I paid $200 for 6 pieces and am hoping they'll turn into about $700 to $800.

Once the bulk of the stuff is gone they offer the aisles of leftover as a batch. Then if there is still stuff in the locker they offer it as a batch. A friend got the locker remains of one locker for $110 and IT PAID OFF. 

He got 3 heavy boxes, one of which was labled reel/reel.  I opened it for him and it had a beautiful Akai reel to reel recorder. There was a box of 10 Ampex metal 10" reels of tape which are also sellable.  The other boxes contained black faced, rack-mountable Heathkit components. I had never seen anything like them. They were definitely more modern than any usual heathkit test equipment I've seen.  Without looking them up I'd say he will sell all the pieces for around $700 or so; a good return on investment.

Here are some pics.

I like the red sculpture, is that one of the pieces you bought? I also like a few of the pieces of art leaning against the wall. Do they have an Asian influence?

I like the red sculpture, is that one of the pieces you bought? I also like a few of the pieces of art leaning against the wall. Do they have an Asian influence?

No, I thought about it but the base is broken on one corner. The guy who bought thought he would just jury-rig it with some black cardboard, but I didn't want to work on repairing it and wasn't sure it would sell. He has a corner in his antique stall for mid-century modern which this piece very broadly falls into.

He also bought one piece of the flat art. After buying it he found the documentation on the back and was happy it had originally sold for $250. Art prices on non-name artists leave a lot to be desired in my book. He only paid maybe $20 for it so he should make money anyway.

Overall the locker wasn't that great, but I'm picky and limited in my selling venues.