I Love Garage Sales

[Accutron]

I went to two garage sales yesterday, and had insane knife finds at both of them. At the first sale I spotted three old Case knives priced at $2-3 each, but then I noticed this completely unused Norman Levine custom slipjoint, with a big $2.00 price sticker...



At the second garage sale, on a table right out front there were some knives and gun accessories. I picked up a brand new first production RAT 1 for $15, and a brand new Benchmade 813 Mini TSEK for $20. The seller and me stood around talking about knives for a while, and then he pulled a case of knives out of his car. He had Spyderco, Benchmade, ZT etc, mostly stuff from 2000-2010 era. Then he offered me a brand new Benchmade 740 Dejavoo for $50. Needless to say, I didn't haggle over the price.



Altogether, I spent $94 on seven knives between the two garage sales. I gave the second guy my business card, and he's supposed to contact me about buying some Spydercos from him in the near future.

[JD Spydo]

Well I haven't hit the jackpot to the degree you have but I have accrued some really interesting finds at local garage sales. I've gotten quite an interesting collection of axes and hatchets and most of them I got for $5 or less and in many cases around $2. I now live in an area that has a lot of garage and estate sales which will free me up to do at sales.

It's amazing how much of this stuff I go through to where people really don't realize what they have in many instances. I've found some really dandy fishing equipment and quite an assortment of tools and kitchen items. The kitchen items I've found are like older Revere Ware and older CorningWare as well as many other high ticket kitchen wares and I got most of it for literally a song ( $2 or less in most cases)

Also we have quite a nice thrift store here where I live and in the past year I've gotten quite a set of J.A. Henckels, Wustof and Messmeister kitchen knives along with other various cutlery items. And I rarely spent over $2 ever on any of them. Like I say I did not hit the jackpot to the degree that "AccutronMan" did but I still feel very fortunate to have saved a ton of money on kitchen wares and various other items. I've literally saved hundreds of dollars and I'm not exaggerating..

[JD Spydo]

[The Meat man]

Awesome finds Accutron!! :eek:

I need to start going to more garage sales! :D

[Doc Dan]

My wife and I love garage sales. We used to go out early every Saturday morning, and sometime on Friday, just to see what we could find. We got some amazing deals on a lot of things. We would find items that were never used and still had the tags on them from the store and we would $1 or $2 for them.

[SpyderEdgeForever]

I had a dream I went to a garage sale and the seller offered me an entire walnut and glass display case packed full of first generation Spyderco Worker knives for a few dollars. Then I woke up :)

[Doc Dan]

I had a dream I went to a garage sale and the seller offered me an entire walnut and glass display case packed full of first generation Spyderco Worker knives for a few dollars. Then I woke up :)

What a dream! :D :D I would be very disappointed at waking from such a dream.

[SpyderEdgeForever]

One of my best real life garage sale knife finds was an authentic American-made Boy Scout Knife. I forget the exact brand, because this was many years ago; it may have been Remington. One of the basic four-bladed ones. The person sold it to me for a few dollars because at the time I was a kid and he saw my early interest in knives. Sadly, I lost it some time later out in the woods. But it is still a good memory.

It looked similiar to these but was in surprising good condition:

http://www.scoutknives.net/index.php/bo ... /remington

That being said, I have also seen many garage sales where I saw nothing of interest. It must depend on who hosts them and where they are.

[JD Spydo]

I had a dream I went to a garage sale and the seller offered me an entire walnut and glass display case packed full of first generation Spyderco Worker knives for a few dollars. Then I woke up :)

To be painfully honest I have never yet ever found any Spyderco knife at any garage sale I've been to in the past 20 years. But for some reason I get the feeling that if I keep hitting them frequently I will at some point hit pay dirt. I can't imagine what scenario would take place to make that happen but I'm going to every one of them expecting it.

Hey it could also be Benchmade, Boker, ZT or even Fallkniven or Boker for that matter. But that's how you got to do garage sales and thrift stores. You've just got to hit them often and continually. I've been seeing a lot of cast iron cookware show up lately and I need to learn more about that particular collectibe. Because you never know when one piece is going to pay off.

[Doc Dan]

I had a dream I went to a garage sale and the seller offered me an entire walnut and glass display case packed full of first generation Spyderco Worker knives for a few dollars. Then I woke up :)

To be painfully honest I have never yet ever found any Spyderco knife at any garage sale I've been to in the past 20 years. But for some reason I get the feeling that if I keep hitting them frequently I will at some point hit pay dirt. I can't imagine what scenario would take place to make that happen but I'm going to every one of them expecting it.

Hey it could also be Benchmade, Boker, ZT or even Fallkniven or Boker for that matter. But that's how you got to do garage sales and thrift stores. You've just got to hit them often and continually. I've been seeing a lot of cast iron cookware show up lately and I need to learn more about that particular collectibe. Because you never know when one piece is going to pay off.

You have to go early before the dealers get there.

[Accutron]

You have to go early before the dealers get there.

Yup, you have to go early and on the first day. Customs vary from region to region, but around here Thursday is the first day of the garage sale weekend. Keep an eye on Craigslist, and organize the garage sales so you can go to as many of them as early as possible. Arrange sales geographically, and try to go to as many 8AM sales before 9AM, then move onto the 9AM sales. You can usually ignore sales that are listed extremely early in the season, or on a day in the middle of the week. Early selling is a sign of desperation, and they're probably not going to have anything good because they already sold their good stuff.

Older middle class neighborhoods are the best - medium sized houses in good condition, well-kept yards with large trees. Most of the of the time if the garage sale is in a newer McMansion neighborhood, they won't have anything good because all of their money is tied up in house/car/kids. Retirement type trailer parks usually don't have much either, because they already sold all of the stuff they didn't want before they moved to the trailer park, and they're holding onto the good stuff for their grandkids. Church sales and annual community garage sales can occasionally be good, but often it's the same people every year scraping together a few random things to sell just so they can participate.

If it's an estate sale that looks promising, if you don't show up a half hour early there will be a line of beards and baseball caps wrapped around the house, waiting to buy up all of the guns, knives, watches, tools, etc.

[Doc Dan]

Absolutely true