How much luck have you had with thrift stores?

[elmwood]

Here in the Austin area, there's a Goodwill computer outlet.  I'll stop by there once a week in my travels, and not once have I come across any sort of mechanical keyboard; it's just mushy membranes.  The inventory moves, but nothing mechanical ever seems to make it to the showroom.  Either mechanical boards are getting grabbed quickly, or the somewhat tech-savvy staff is taking them for their own use.

How much luck have you had finding decent keyboards at thrift stores?

[xsphat]

Same as you. I gave up months ago.

[billm]

There's one place here where I live that I've had quite good luck with. I've gotten about 5 boards there, mostly blue alps for $5/ea but also an Ambra BS for $1 and an NMB board with their switches, which I've never seen before. I posted the name of the place in another thread but someone suggested that I remove it so I did.

I've kind of picked the place over for now, but I'll have to check back there in a month or two. These guys test and recycle gear into free linux boxes so one interesting thing that happens is they're not too interested in old AT keyboards so I think they throw them into the for sale pile.

[Mercen_505]

I've never had any luck with that. My wife used to troll the nearby Goodwill stores (of which there were nearly a dozen) looking for oddities, and I'd occasionally tag along. I never found any good keyboards, but I did find pristine copies of IBM DOS 2.0 and Microsoft Macro Assembler, complete with binders and disks!

[andb]

Probably the best way would be to befriend one of the workers at these places, explain what you are looking for and "help them out" with a "finders fee". That way you know they'll stash the good stuff for you behind the counter. Just explain well what you are looking for so they don't call with the wrong stuff.

I think though that recycling centers, schools, large company IT departments, etc. are probably the best places to check these days.

I got really "lucky" with a post in an online linux users group forum, from which one  response netted me over 30 boards for about 30USD. But after all the work of cleaning the things up, which fortunately I found fun and relaxing, I realized that from a financial standpoint I would have been better off ordering 3 or four boards I was interested in from ebay even at premium prices. The benefit of finding all these old boards though was that I got to try 5 different Alps switches, Cherry blacks, a Mitsumi switch, and a few other odd ones, probably about 10 switch types in all. Alternatively for this though, it would be great to have Geek hack meet-ups.

My case would best be described as "overdose", which helped me to get switch-lust out of my head a bit. In the end I found the one I like the best (Alps Yellow linears with cut springs) and plan to stick with this for a while, until maybe I try a Topre based board.

[lexicon]

I've always found Goodwill and the Salvation Army stores depressing and worthless as far as computer stuff goes.  But a couple of years ago I read that around here they (SA & GW) actually skim off the better donations and sell them to Ohio Thrift, a for-profit chain with 3-4 stores in Columbus.

So I have found some interesting stuff at Ohio Thrift, though not keyboards.  But they do have an apparently endless supply of decent 17-19" CRT monitors, including Trinitrons, for $5 - $10.  You can even plug them in first.