Here’s a video from a recent rubbish collection. I wish there had been more to go through, but at least I found some cool things to play with! What’s the best thing you’ve found in something somebody else had thrown away?

The local council rubbish collection is always an interesting opportunity to see what people have decided they no longer want. Sometimes there’s nothing worth carrying home, and other times you find something far too interesting to leave sitting on the side of the road.

This time I’ve managed to find a rather nice floppy disk storage box. I was actually considering buying one on eBay for around twenty dollars, and here’s one sitting outside waiting to be thrown away! It even looks to have survived the years without going horribly yellow.

It’ll need a good clean, of course, but then I can fill it with floppy disks and pretend that my storage arrangements are becoming more organised. There’s even a lock on it, although I suspect the key won’t be particularly difficult to replace.

I also found a Nintendo AV cable, which was quite a useful discovery because I actually needed one. Not the most exciting thing in the world, perhaps, but it’s always nice when the rubbish collection provides something practical. I would’ve liked to find the rest of whatever Nintendo console it came from, but unfortunately that wasn’t there.

There was a Toshiba record player and a Sharp tape deck too. Unfortunately, neither turned out to be particularly promising as a repair project. The record player was missing an important metal part of its platter mechanism, while the tape deck had trouble playing tapes despite being able to rewind and fast-forward. It looks as though some of the rubber inside had deteriorated rather badly.

And let me tell you, carrying all this equipment home wasn’t exactly pleasant. My arms hurt, my neck hurt, and I was beginning to wonder why I hadn’t just stayed inside with a nice cup of tea.

But then there’s the enormous speaker!

This thing is magnificent. It’s a big, heavy speaker with separate drivers, a rather lovely old-fashioned cabinet and a rating of 40 W RMS. There are two tweeters across the top and a larger driver below, with Plessey and Philips names on the speakers themselves. More importantly, it actually works! I’ve got it hooked up to an amplifier for testing, and I’m quite pleased with how it sounds.

I carried the thing for roughly a kilometre and a half, which probably explains why just about every part of me was complaining afterwards. Still, I couldn’t leave something like that to be destroyed. It’s far too nice looking, and I’d love to find another matching speaker somewhere.

Perhaps one day I’ll hook it up to a valve amplifier, just for the fun of it. First I need to find somewhere sensible to put it, which seems to be an ongoing problem with nearly everything I bring home.

So that’s the latest haul of rubbish. A useful floppy disk box, an AV cable, a couple of unsuccessful repair candidates and one enormous speaker that’s much heavier than anything has a right to be.

Not a bad result, even if my back might disagree!