Skip Diving

[JonL]

Cant believe the find I had in a skip yesterday evening so I got to share it.

 

A guy at the other end of my street has sold up his house, bought a huge motor home and is just heading South. Anyway for last 30 years he has been a lift engineer so has huge collection of stuff to dispose of, he's been selling like crazy of Ebay for months. Anyway hes now down to the rubbish and got a skip in.

 

As I walked past last night I had a look in (Not sure what it is about skips but I just have to look!), anyway he was coming out of his house and said Jump in anything you want take it

 

So in I go! (Got in a load of trouble when I got home of SWMBO apparently I had one of my best pair of jeans on and the excuse that the red skip diving mist had descended was not valid.)

 

Apart from enough half drums 1.5mm cable to re-wire an aircraft carrier and some good lengths of Sapele I found an 18V cordless jigsaw, circular saw and a nailer with two batteries Draper. They look like theyve been hardly used just need some TLC.

 

Anyway back in the garage (now with an approved pair of jeans on) after an hour of cleaning and contact polishing Ive got all three working, one battery has a tiny amount of go and reads 18.8V on the meter so Im hopeful about that one, the other is dead flat and only goes 17.2V on the meter so I might not be able get that one going again. Bought a charger off Ebay for £25, so at new prices Ive got £400 worth of kit for £25 result!

 

Guess where Im going tonight!

 

So I open the floor whats your best skip find?

Edited September 2, 2010 by JonL

[carlt]

20 12'x3'x2" Brazilian Mahogany work tops from a school lab refit.

 

Pity most of it was used to furnish the house that my ex now lives in but there you go.

[Speedwheel]

20 12'x3'x2" Brazilian Mahogany work tops from a school lab refit.

 

Wow, that will take some beating, what a find.

 

Criminal though (not that you took them, that they were throwing them in a skip!)

Edited September 2, 2010 by Speedwheel

[JonL]

20 12'x3'x2" Brazilian Mahogany work tops from a school lab refit.

 

I make that approx 80 square metres and I've just found a price of £150 per square metre for 50mm board - so that's £12,000 !

[carlt]

I make that approx 80 square metres and I've just found a price of £150 per square metre for 50mm board - so that's £12,000 !

That and the 60 odd feet of 9" x 3" parana pine, that were the old bannisters, and all the old woodwork benches, that I could only take two of, but I did remove all the very nice vices.

 

I also got loads of lesser wood, that were the school library shelves, half a dozen Belfast sinks, from the labs and the carcasses of the old floor to ceiling roller blackboards (utile, I think).

 

The guys doing the school refit called me "Skippy".

[JonL]

Very very impressive

Close the thread !

The winner has been found for sure !

[stewey]

The guys doing the school refit called me "Skippy".

Because you hop from skip to skip!

 

That certainly was some find though, Carl.

 

Stewey

[Morat]

I bet it was all replaced with something "more modern" that looked tatty after 2 years

[koukouvagia]

20 12'x3'x2" Brazilian Mahogany work tops from a school lab refit.

 

 

Schools seem to be a good source of recyclable material .

I rescued a 12v supply unit for a school physics lab. It had beautiful old dials and ('fraid I don't know its technical name) a device which allowed me manually to increase or decrease the voltage when charging the batteries.

The same school was re-furbishing the changing rooms and was chucking out lengths of hundred year old reeded tongue and groove – just right for the butty's back cabin.

Also they were skipping huge lengths of seasoned pine – 20' x 12” x 3”which came from the old stage. I used these to make a tree house in the garden at home.

[carlt]

Very very impressive

Close the thread !

The winner has been found for sure !

 

Not necessarily...I know a man who has the key to a certain DIY chain's distribution centre skip compound and is allowed to take what he wants, saving them £70 a ton disposal fees.

 

Any bit of wood that gets slightly knocked or bruised gets skipped and finds its way into his van.

 

I helped him convert a whole stack of hardwood conservatory kits into 2x2 lengths of usable wood, once, and that was just a tiny proportion.

[kiki]

A fully functioning off road bike (sold on ebay for £400.00), a fully working cooler/freezer box, a large load tumble dryer (needed a hose at the back)(sold on ebay for £50), and enough solid oak flooring to do our entire boat, a 24 piece dinner service - unbroken, and a small deep freezer - fully funcional which still stands on our boat. - the Much Beloved is known as the Skip Rat !!

[Guest wanted]

I am impressed at all the valuable stuff that has been found, but for me it was when I was down on my arse in the south of france, I had no money and no means of getting anywhere without hitching. I went for a bin dive and found loads of food still in date and a pushbike in fully working order! That for me was the best find as I made it a bit further up and got a job grape picking.

 

I have also 'tatted' two massive crash mats from a gym, sold them to a circus performance school for £100, a couple of tidy standard lamps from an old hotel and we even found a couple of church pews which now live in a youth project in Dorset.

 

Last week my lady managed to find a pair of gortex berghaus walking boots in my size that fit perfectly.

 

Happy Tatting

[bag 'o' bones]

Whilst working P/T at B&Q they had a clear out of unsaleable shed kits, basically anything that had been robbed for spares or had been damaged in storage. Managed to claim enough parts to build one decent 4X8' shed plus spare sides and bases that were stripped down for other projects. Also claimed quite a bit of slightly damaged trellis.

 

Also got the job of desposing of a quantity of returned power tools that were unfit for sale due to minor defects. I was supposed to have smashed them up with a hammer and chucked them in the skip but as you can imagine most of it got diverted to the boot of my car intact. Managed to repair two B and D battery drills, and a couple of sanders. All that was wrong were disconnected spade connectors. Result!

Edited September 2, 2010 by bag 'o' bones

[Laurie Booth]

1k inverter in good working order, been thrown away as part of an outside broadcast van update.

Didn't find any cameras

[Chertsey]

This:

 

 

OK it was at the local tip, but OH did have to haul it out of the skip much to the consternation of the attendant. Of all the finds over the years, I reckon this is the best one, especially as it was exactly what I was looking for.

[alan_fincher]

This:

 

 

OK it was at the local tip, but OH did have to haul it out of the skip much to the consternation of the attendant. Of all the finds over the years, I reckon this is the best one, especially as it was exactly what I was looking for.

 

Is it a "River" class butty to pair with Chertsey ?

[Chertsey]

Surely that would be the skip itself?

[alan_fincher]

Surely that would be the skip itself?

Yes, fair point!

[Mrs Humdinger]

Small in comparison I know, but a cast iron frying pan with lid, which after a good clean and oil, lasted for best part of 10 years before it gave up.

[sociable_hermit]

A railway semaphore signal arm, with lenses intact.

 

My mate spotted the top 2" of it sticking out of someone's bin, on the old Meon Valley line, and the whole emergency stop - bin raid - back of car routine took about 45 seconds. Cost me some serious tyre wear, mind.

[Christine]

We took away quantities of MDF from a factory in Littlehamptom (with their consent) We made up loads of furniture which we sold at Stansted Garden Show making £600 profit which paid for a backpacking trip to Croatia and Dalmatian Islands.

[Water-rats]

Puppy in a box. We heard the whimpering as we walked past. Poor pup was dehydrated, rather emaciated, covered in sores and infested with fleas. As we discovered after we dived in and pulled him out. We called the police but the skip hirer said he knew nothing about it as was really shocked. We called the pup Hector and he lived until 15. Cost £500 + at the vets to sort him out but worth every penny

[Ray T]

Got some unused indrustrial carpet from a skip at work.

 

It happily lived in the kitchen for 12 years until new SWIMBO moved in.

 

The carpet was a brown mottly colour and for some reason the new Mrs T took exception to it so out it went.

 

Also when we moved offices got a stainless steel BT Piper logo and took it to the new office.

 

Tried to sell it on eBay - no takers.

 

Got some unused indrustrial carpet from a skip at work.

 

It happily lived in the kitchen for 12 years until new SWIMBO moved in.

 

The carpet was a brown mottly colour and for some reason the new Mrs T took exception to it so out it went.

 

edit to add:

 

Mrs T writes:

 

Ladies of the parish, had you seen (or smelled) this monstrosity then you would either have sued for divorce or as in my case, made it a condition of a pre nuptual agreement that it saw the local tip.

Mrs T

[magnetman]

I found a £20 note in a skip in 1986.

[cheshire~rose]

My ex used to work night shifts next door to a supplier of industrial cleaning products. they used to get pallets delivered with their stock on and if any containers were damaged and had leaked at all they used to skip the lot rather than clean the it up. The most commonly damaged thing was a bucket of gel hand cleaner (swarfega type stuff) which would then splatter a whole pallet load of plastic containers of hand cleaner in various sizes. The lot went in the skip! There were often other types of ceaner for use in the motor or catering trade mostly.

the skip would get unloaded that night and hosed down to wash the gel off before loading it into the back of our pick up truck and home to sell. We had a regular advert in Bargain pages which shifted most of it and would occasionally do a car boot when we got a stock pile and even had a guy who would regularly collect a trailer load each time he came over from Ireland.

The neighbours were always thrilled to see their apparently bottomless skip used to empty overnight because being industrial chemicals it cost them a lot to get it emptied. I never really understood why they did not employ someone to hose the stuff down themselves?

 

Not quite a skip find but on another occasion some tinkers took over another neighbouring site and when they left there was the usual debris tipped on the car park. We noticed a lot of block paviers - used ones - someone had replaced a block paved drive I think. We managed to get a load on a 7½ ton truck before dawn - the council were likely to clear the site the next day. A load of sand, hire a whacker plate and a block splitter and we had a lovely block paved drive for very little money at all!