Just a small detour from the norm to break things up a little.
I myself have in the past collected comic books and Star Wars action figures. Currently all packed away good and tight for the day I get grandkids. Figure they may be worth something by then!

Anyone else have collectables?

Nice topic!

I've a tough time collecting because I like to use the things I have, but I collect old video games --Atari ones to be exact. There is something about the early games that remains highly addictive and compelling.

Used to collect old radios. Might take that up again some day. Had to give them up long ago in a move to get married. In the 80's it was easy to find all sorts of cool vacuum tube radios. Lots of interesting designs. I would restore them, replace parts and strings and then just listen to them for a while before getting another one.

My main problem is I am somewhat of a packrat. I collect anything and everything. Never seem to let go of stuff. Man I hope I never have to move again!!!! At last check if you stacked all of my comics together the stack would be 27 feet tall!! Guess I got carried away for a number of years. Have all of the ones were they killed off Superman quite a few years back!

Had a good friend, who collected when he was young.

Loved reading those each month. We got one shot, no greasy food, then back in the covers they went.

X-Men is my favorite.

I still have all of mine from when I was a kid...good thing!

Incredible Hulk #180....Last page (full page) first appearance of Wolverine....goes for a pretty good price these days!! :~)

Avenger's is my favorite...and Captain America!

We read Mad magazine, and Archie and Richie Rich comics on vacations, and had stacks at our cabin, lots of Peanuts books, too.

Beatle Bailey.....now that was a good read!

Dagwood and Blondie!

Had almost forgotten that one!

Loved the little goofy drawing in many of the margins. And there is at least one poor kid at every school that looks like Alfred E. Newmann.

I collect too much stuff to list, my main passion is Virginia Weaver Pottery, which is emerald green with cedar boughs embossed on it from the WPA era, and impossible to find lately, especially since someone with deep, deep pockets wins it all on eBAy lately. If you ever see it, buy it, and I'll pay you back.

I'm a total packrat, too, trying to reform.

I never could get into action/adventure comics or cartoons. It's gotta' be humor to get my attention.

Tacky postcards are one of my things. Mostly crappy old advertising, poorly photographed food, etc. Maybe someday I'll figure out how to post a few of them on my pathetic, so-called webpage that I started but didn't get very far on.

Many of my cards are reprints from Quantity Postcards. I found one with a picture of the famous Bomber Gas Station on this website.

Hey Randy, this is a great site!

I'm gonna spend some here later on...

I collect older airchecks, I mean, the ones I personally recorded in the fairly distant past, plus a few that I've "traded" for or were given to me. Its always nice to hear from an appreciative ex-jock who never made an aircheck while they were in the business.

Pro Wrestling Magazines, wrestling videos and dvd's. Have a very large sports card collection that is worth little to nothing right now as that market totally bottomed out. It has been so long since I have really examined what I have with that sports card collection but if I had to pick out a treasured item from the sports card collection it would be the Autographed 8 x 10 Gary Peyton photo in his college jersey. He signed it for me at a sports card show at the Salem Armory.

I am getting rid of some of the stupid and kids like wrestling memorabilia currently. In favor for older and odd ball items that only serious old school wrestling fans would be able to appreciate ie pre WWF era stuff. The treasured piece is a magazine titled TV Wrestling from the early 60's with Lou Thesz on the cover and a aerial photo of a wrestling show that took place at Chicago's Cominsky Park.

Also have a small but somewhat impressive tap handle collection from when my family owned a tavern. The treasured piece of that collection is a Blitz Weinhard handle in pretty good shape.

I have literally tens of thousands of baseball cards from my junior high and high school days (back in the mid-80s) ... and, well, that's about it really.

OK...now inventory them!!!! READY...GO!! LOL

One day I may inventory my comics......or maybe i'll just wait and make the grandkids do it...when they sprout!!

My "jones" has been Zippo cigarette lighters. I've got almost 800 of every stripe & persausion, but it kinda' got out of hand, as there's no end to the variations. So I've settled (lately) on collecting radio station Zippo lighters, which are not that common, and getting rarer all the time, with the demise of (a). smoking and (b). radio stations using 'gimmick products' for promos.

Good thread!

I quit collecting Comics because one company came out with a really cool holo cover.....the result was the one book was 2.95. Then everyone jumped on the gimmick covers and the books got priced way out of hand. It was ridiculous and that was the end for me.

The comic industry suffered at large because of that as many collector's like me got disenchanted with collecting them.

When I was in high school I read "HEAVY METAL" on a regular basis. It was somewhat an adult comic but what really caught my eye was there was a lot of artwork in there from H.R. Giger....(Alien)....Morpheius.....and many many others.....It was kind of a meeting of Sci-fi, Fantasy, and playboy. But the artwork was completely incredible. There is a website if you want to check it out just google Heavy Metal Magazine. It is not quite what it used to be like it was in the 80's and I unfortuneateley traded my collection for some other merchandise. :~(

It does good to talk about something other than Politic's and Religion once in a while!

I wish I had the cash to collect classic animation cels. I especially love the old Warner Bros cartoons.

So I'm just collecting dust instead.

Odd movie/tv show props. ( Even reproductions work for me ).

The rock group Queen memorabilia.

Industrial art.

Old eye charts, speculums, nipple shavers, stuff like that.

Sutton, I would love to do the same thing!

Old cartoons are just great.

hell CJ, you should see MY nipple shaver collection!

"It does good to talk about something other than Politic's and Religion once in a while!"

Amen, Brother!

CJ and Skep, let's test and compare!

Whoooaaah down a bit here. Think were starting to slide sideways into the "I Don't Need To Know That" category! Let's leave that for another topic shall we!!!

CJ tell us a bit more about what is in the Queen collection. They are my fav but I never amassed much of their memorabilia.

I wonder who has ownership of some of Freddie's on stage wardrobe?

May sound a bit odd, but I like to collect the in-store videos places like Champs Sports, Freddie's, Zumiez and others play on the TV sets, well, in their stores.

Usually if an employee or shopper doesn't "schnagg" a video or DVD at the end of its run (usually they run for a month) someone will throw them away upon running the new copy. Best thing is you can usually schnagg them for free.......can't beat that.............

While they might not be the greatest thing in terms of "entertainment value" they can be fun to collect. If nothing else, the programmes with commercials in them could make a rather interesting "historical record" of sorts some 10 or 20 years from now, showing fashions, songs, movies, trends etc. from "long ago.........."

Dang!

I keep getting mental images of the nipple shavers at work.

"CJ tell us a bit more about what is in the Queen collection."

First of all - everything they've ever recorded. Covers, remakes, live versions, bootlegs etc. I listen to all that stuff even still.

A collection of die cast cars which have various album cover graphics on them.

Tour programmes from just about every tour.

Backstage passes.

A very odd collection of press clippings.

Videos from concerts.

Unique posters.

And I am negotiating with a guy in England to buy his News Of The World Robot. It's about 5 feet tall and looks REALLY good. He wants 500 pounds - shipping would be another 500 pounds.

White label remixes.

Nothing autographed though. I'm really picky about that. No gold albums or anything. ( Although I have a Gold Sgt. Pepper album framed that I love ).

Brian May nipple shaver.

You gotta check out youtube for some pretty amazing concert footage too. Stuff I hadn't seen before is available to watch. Secret rehearsal footage. Pretty neat to see.

"Highlander" The original movie...you gotta have something from that right?

No props. But tons of Queen related stuff to that movie.

Best movie ever made...number two all time favorite was Armagedon!

Music soundtrack was awesome in both!!

There can be only one!

Love that movie ---was my first DVD.

I collect old "vintage" Playboy Magazines. I look at them ONLY for the articles. Educational purposes:0

sutton says
I keep getting mental images of the nipple shavers at work.

How about the one and only "PUBE shaver". Used by the one and only Freddie MERCURY! Comes with free Freddie Mercury public hair.

I'm a bit of a packrat, and I see no need to reform. One of the things that I collect are radios and antique electronics:

* I have a few old transistor radios.

* I have an old Mallory UHF converter

* I have a vacuum tube amplifier chassis with the Muzak logo on it ('50s vintage)--I need to get a pair of 6L6s to get it working again.

* I have several tube AM and AM/FM table radios. The most interesting one is a 1948 vintage Zenith 7H820 AM/"FM 45"/"FM 100" radio. This radio has two FM bands: the 88-108 MHz band and the old 42-48 MHz "Armstrong" band. There is even an Armstrong patent sticker on the back of the radio. As if that is not cool enough, the 12BA6 (RF amplifier pentode) and 12BE6 (pentagrid converter) tubes in the front end are used for all three bands, just with different tuned circuits.

* A Knight AM/FM tuner, early 1960s vintage (in need of restoration)

* Two solid state reel-to-reel decks, one mid 1960s vintage and one mid '70s vintage, both functional

* Emerson 25" color TV from the late 1960s. The only transistor in the entire unit is in the UHF tuner.

* RCA 12" black-and-white hybrid solid state & tube TV, circa 1970, made in Taiwan.

* Several old TV test pattern generators

* Several tube signal generators

* Several AM Stereo radios, some originally born that way, some not

* Many, many U-Matic video cassettes

Another thing that I have been collecting, not electronics related, are cold war-era propaganda films. These have chiefly been downloaded from archive.org and saved on CD-Rs (I have a DVD player that will play MPEG files on CD-R).

Ahhh wow Alfredo, I'd LOVE to have a collection of that! That stuff FASCINATES me!

Alfredo~

"I have a vacuum tube amplifier chassis with the Muzak logo on it ('50s vintage)--I need to get a pair of 6L6s to get it working again."

Those rigs do come up on E-Bay quite a bit (as well as original, phonographic Muzak radio transcriptions from the 50s and even earlier)...type "muzak" into the Search function and see what comes up.

You might be able to find one to cannibalise for parts (tubes, transformers, knobs...), assuming the tubes are still in good order.

Is yours one of the Jensens with the fancy, "pseudo-calligraphic" (as I call it) "Music by MUZAK" logo on its cover?

I'm pretty sure that mine was made by Universal Audio (I'm at the office right now, so I can't check). I replaced a few paper capacitors, and all the other components appeared to be in good condition. The 6L6 tubes that came with the unit are most likely not the originals: one is glass and the other is metal. When powered up, the amplifier works fine for a few minutes, but then the bias voltages go all out of whack and the metal 6L6 gets really hot (I think that it could be gassy). Fortunately, 6L6s/5881s are still commonly available because there are still a plethora of musical instrument amplifiers out there that use this tube. I just have to be careful to steer clear of overpriced tubes marketed to guitar players.

I did an e-bay search on Muzak, and there sure is a lot of Muzak stuff there, including a promotional cigarette lighter and playing cards! I didn't see any tube amps this time around, though.

Alfredo_t:
If you swap the two 6L6's in their sockets, the metal one still is the one that gets hot...right?

> If you swap the two 6L6's in their sockets, the
> metal one still is the one that gets hot...right?

I don't remember if I tried this. I'll give this a try before I buy new tubes! Thanks.

Alfredo~

I love collecting the Stimulus Progression LPs. Muzak used to put those out like, back in the 60s and 70s (and for a while into the 80s) as a demonstration of Muzak's music styles at that time for prospective users.

Yup...as far as "elevator music" goes you can't get any more pure than that. No kidding, it's the real thing........

Also, re: tubes~ While I was at the coast a couplea years ago for a "crab festival" (I think it was somewhere north of Rockaway Beach, Wheeler I think......they have a big seafood restaurant, with detached outhouse [no kidding], right along the water) I came across this little run-down antique shop run by an older man and possibly his wife. It's right across from the really *big* maze-like antique mall with the espresso shop if you have ever been in the area.

Anyways, aside from having vintage-1940s and -50s radio sets (I got my '49 Crosley there a couple years ago for $50!) and boxes upon boxes of '78s, back in the other section of the store he had a couple big boxes of old assorted radio tubes, most of which he says still work perfectly.

Check it out if ever you venture through the area--it's right on 101, and it has a little porch out in front.

Of course, if nothing else Radio Shack still has tubes (last time I checked a few years back anyways--they may not carry them any more)...........

I just wanted to say thanks to an anonymous donor who left a pair of 6L6GAs at my doorstep yesterday!

It appears that one of the old tubes was the problem. The output stage of this amplifier is a relatively simple design in which the bias for the 6L6s is developed by a 200 ohm resistor from the cathodes of the tubes to the chassis ground. With the old tubes, the voltage developed across this resistor is 25 V for the first minute or two, and then it starts to climb to 30 or more volts. With the new tubes, the voltage stays steady at 25.1-25.8 V. According to a schematic that I found for a similar amplifier, this is the right bias voltage for a 200 ohm cathode biasing resistor.

I have the amplifier connected to a tuner playing KKSN (and now KKAD). It just seems proper.

You're Welcome!

Some of the "golden ear- tube folks" actually prefer the "sweet sound" of the older 6L6-GA's over some of the new production tubes from Russia and China. I have a friend that especially likes the old surplus JAN-marked Sylvania tubes. (I could never descern any difference, however).

Life may be a question with tubes that old, but if they check in the high 90's (out of 100) on an emission checker, they should last for a while!

Are you using the Knight tuner for a "total tube sound" ?

I haven't gotten around to restoring the Knight tuner yet. I'll see if I can get it running next week. The Knight has separate dial pointers for AM and FM with tuning eye tubes in the dial pointers! That's just got to look cool when it's on.

There are two things that are a bit unique about the Muzak amplifier. One is that the output transformer, in addition to the plate windings has an extra set of windings that go to the cathodes of the 6L6s. Presumably, this is meant to provide some extra feedback? This is not to be confused with the "ultra-linear" screen grid taps, which are not used in this amplifier.

The other unusual feature is that the input to this amplifier was meant to come from a "dry pair" leased telephone circuit (in other words, a balanced, floating ground, audio circuit without a DC voltage). The input therefore has a line equalization circuit and space for conditioning circuits and a volume control for a second line (the 2nd line circuitry is not present in my amp).

I once knew of a guy who had two of those Muzak amps in his garage (I have no idea where he got them from, Flea Market maybe) and had a stereo turntable, with each channel hooked to its own amp & speaker. (He also played electric guitar and used one of those amps for it.)

Needless to say he had a stereo system in its purest form (two side-by-side mono amps)..........had a chance to listen a few years back, to "Sgt. Pepper" LP (original British Parlophone issue, with the gibberish on the run-out on side 2!) and could immediately tell the difference between that and the same disc (borrowed) played through my fancy Harmon Kardon.

If I could find two of those amps locally I would surely be doing the same, might even try to do my Sound Blaster a little bit of justice if that's at all possible.

Alas, neighbour guy died a couple years ago (heart attack, followed by massive stroke several months later), widow moved away and I never did figure out what happened to that stereo setup......chances are one of the kids may have gotten it or something, don't remember seeing it in the estate sale. (I would have bought it I can tell you right now.....)