Cleaning out a TV repair shop basement

[Electronic M]

Last Saturday I journeyed to Indiana to pick up a load of 25 CRTs off ebay....The seller told me he found 25 more and had a bunch of sets so I was fairly stoked.

I wanted to rent a bigger van, but those Enterprise charges mileage on, which would have more than doubled rental cost.
DSCN2120 by Tom Carlson, on Flickr

We got there in the later part of the afternoon, and ventured inside. The upper half did not have many TVs and all were SS era sets (I did grab a CTC-68 RCA console for someone I know, and as a support for the plywood that the upper level sat on).

The basement was a real trip. The way to get sets in and out is an 'elevator' consisting of the lift mech off of a fork lift with a piece of ply wood on it...Which is a decent bit smaller than the opening in the floor for it (I wish I took a picture of it). A stairway also exists, but it is not easy to use even without carrying a set... The building is deeper than it is wide and the basement is split in half the long way by a stone wall that obviously had a human sized hole knocked in it to access the other half...The half with access to the ground floor was in better shape and had most of the sets, as well as magazine racks from a bus station he used to own, video game cabinets, stuff from when it was a carpet store, and other things I can only vaguely guess at from memory. He said the basement was 5000 SQFT, and that space was lit by ~6 incandescent bulbs...Needless to say there was not much more light than needed to not trip and fall on yer face (if I go back I plan to bring the biggest, brightest mother of a flashlight I can find)...I could not really get almost any photos down there without the camera taking a black rectangle and calling it a picture. The other side of the basement had a dirt floor and contained the extra 25 tubes which I got a picture of (I got a few of those), and a doorway the the back room. In the top corner of that doorway was either the most peculiar mold flower ever or the shell of what used to be a 3-4" diameter spider. There in the back room were the original lot of CRTs and 2-4 sets (including the motorola 23" table model). I got most (basically all the nicer ones) of those tubes in the back room. There is still some 23V and 25V rectangular deltagun CRTs that I want there. There were no roundy colors there or AFAIK any sets pre-1962 (and maybe not even that old)...Mid 60's to late 70's mostly color appeared to be dominant. There are 2-5 console TVs left (more could be buried) and somewhere around 12-20 table tops. Roughly half the sets did not have the backs on or anywhere I could find/get to them....I did see some backs but too much digging would be needed. He said much of the arcade and bus stand stuff was going to go soon so if I go again it should be easier to get to stuff.



We left around 9:45pm local time, tired and with not quite with a whole van load. It was all we could do to pack it all well. We got home between 2-3Am central time.

Here are some pictures of the packing job which did well...No tubes went to air, no sets were noticeably damaged, and nothing much moved during the trip so the pack job photographed next morning is a good representation of what it was when we left.


Picture/post limit reached.