He sold it for $500 and later found out he probably could have gotten $800 if he'd cleaned it a little first.
Wow! Hey, where's your cut?
its interesting, cleaning things up just a little bit can sometimes add hundreds of dollars. Also, original box. its worth
so much. So much so that, today I save
all the original boxes for any electronics i buy. Cuz when I inevitably upgrade and sell off old stuff, I get top dollar for having the original box.
Why would anyone pay 500-800 dollars for one old, ugly and uncomfortable chair?
good question. In the case of the sliderule, by the way, even the collectors websites I visited, declared this model to be one of "the great ones", one website called it "a must have for any serious collector", and another named the sliderule museums (yes, they exist! apparently!) in which this model was displayed. So right off the bat I had an inkling that pursuing the question of price would probably be worthwhile.
Once I identified the model, it was easy to find out selling prices. In my case, it wasnt just ebay searches;
there is an actual sliderule website that tracks historical prices, by model, website put together by some total sliderule fanatic, but extremely helpful, because it actually charted out
the best times of the year, month, and even time of day, to sell or buy
Sliderule nuts are
serious nuts
But it made my job easy in terms of figuring out the model and its value, so I didnt have to spend gobs of time really.
But yea, once you start googling, I think you
can pretty quickly get a sense of "is this going to be worth selling or not?".
Ahh who am I to talk? I spent 150 bucks on a keyboard someone found in the garbage
lol, exactly. me too
(plus it has a special place in my heart that makes me all warm and fuzzy thinking about it)...
Heck, I actually considered paying $150 for an old 'crash bang smashemup' car toy that I have serious feelings for from when I was little, I found a pristine unopened box on ebay, and I was actually tempted. I didnt do it tho. I'm not made out of cash! But if I were, I'd have bought it in a second
Warm fuzzy feeling, serously. Its like that guy's childhood sled (rosebud) in citizen Kane. [oops, spoiler alert]
And that was just for a $10 toy that only people who played with it in their childhood in the late 70s would even know or care about.