Some new stuff: Speakers, stereo equip and LEGOS!

Gentle reader,

It's been a while since I made an entry as State Farm and the body shop needed to see certain photos I'd made of the hidden damage to the Capri.

Now that they have, here's some real bargains that I've found of late:
Above is the electronic stuff. A pair of Paradigm Mini-Monitor speakers, a Sansui Classique T-470 tuner and Classique A-470 integrated amp, A Denon DRM-710 3-head cassette deck
and a Sony 5-disc SACD/CD/DVD changer.
Here is a close-up of the Sansui equipment. They are nothing but re-introduced and renamed A-60 and T-60 models of a few years earlier. I have found no information on the Classique line as to when they came out. The amplifier is rated at 45 watts per channel RMS. Very clean specs and very clean sound. The tuner is very sensitive and really pulls in the stations. It has signal strength LEDs and to the right of that > | < LEDs that tell you which way to tune and that you have tuned it. Amazing sound quality and it makes me wonder whether I could go back to so simple a set up. OR would I be settling and later regret selling the good stuff.
Here's the Denon cassette and Sony changer. I am keeping the Denon and in fact have already replaced the older Denon. The Sony I will sell.
The Legos are from two day's finds at The Village, our favorite thrift store. Paid a total of $70 for well over TWENTY pounds of Legos. If you've priced Lego sets new, you KNOW that was a bargain. Katie and the boys came over yesterday and Anthony was here too. Most of us played with Legos. Some of the boys preferred Light Saber fights.

The boat and other things above I built, just playing around. We started digging for "people" and found at least 30 of them. Legos sure have changed since we were kids.

My brother Jim had custody of our Legos. He graciously brought a large shoe-box full for Katie
and her boys as well as other educational toys. Right up Katie's alley.

Check out that boat! Pretty cool, huh? It has front and rear mounted wind turbines. It's an electric boat, you see. Unique screw drive at the rear. Large multi-sided (brown ball) solar cells too. It has two sets of batteries. One set drives the motors while the other set is being charged. When one set is exhausted, the other takes over.
Once real battery technology is able to allow two sets in vehicles, wind driven and solar charging can really work.
Here's a close-up of the two Denon cassette decks. The newer one is on top. It has Dolby HX-Pro as well as more advanced features. You'd be surprised how good cassettes can sound with a good three-head deck. They each sold for $400 in the early and mid-1990s.

Here is a close-up of the Vifa tweeter(s) I installed in the Paradigm Mini-Monitors. One of the 1" aluminum-dome tweeters didn't work. So, I removed the face plate and carefully cut out the factory cover/diffuser and installed the Vifas which are from a pair of Paradigm Titan speakers. They are 3/4" silk dome units. I then had to enlarge the opening in the grille structure to fit the larger face-plates. Quite a job that was, especially to protect the grille fabric.
Most of you don't know that Nancy has become a gun-owner. She has a concealed-carry permit and now has arrest powers too. She bought a Glock 17 and a Kimber smaller automatic. Both are 9mm. I've fired both and prefer the Glock. The Kimber has one heck of a kick.

Being that although I like shooting, I think there are easier ways to make holes in targets of paper. So, I bought a full-metal gas-powered Air-Soft 6mm model 1911 (Colt 45) pistol. It weighs two pounds six ounces fully loaded with 30 rounds. That's 30 6mm plastic balls. Propane is the gas that propel the rounds and it works exactly like a real gun. The slide comes back every time it's "fired" and locks back when the magazine is empty. I bought a second magazine and a leg holster:
I just won a second one. This pistol was $60. The other is a tactical model which is called "V4". It can be seen on eBay. Just enter this item number on a search page: 160653480420
eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices

LASTLY, I sold some more cameras and now feel the collection is where I want to keep it:
That's just twenty cameras. Way less than 1/10th what I once had. Not shown is the paper pin-hole camera and the Busch Pressman 4x5" large format and the Bessa R 35mm rangefinder and all it's lenses.

That's all the news that's fit to print. Thanks for looking!

Scott