What else to flip / collect
 

What do you flip or collect besides old bikes? I'm looking for another hobby.

Man, I need another hobby like I need a hole in the head... this one is keeping me plenty occupied. ;)

But for the record... vintage cameras are also in my collection.

Karl

A friend of mine was buying and flipping houses. It didn't end well but she made a lot of money for a few years. The market in Toronto hasn't slowed down quite as much as the market in the US but yeah, I think she is going back to her old job.

I buy and sell Lionel trains. Mostly Post-War '50s stuff. Its a huge market on ebay. Lots of bidding wars on the unique items. Best time to buy is now, summer months, then sell in winter months. Gotta know what your looking at though. Quite a few repaints and questionable items as well.

It was common , in the Chicago area anyway, for bike shops to sell trains and hobby stuff in the winter months. I would imagine anywhere in the northern climes that would have been true. The interest in hobbies has gone the way of the dodo with the total addiction of kids to video games though. Most guys that buy trains are geezers looking for the nostalga of toy trains. Myself included!

I have done well selling on ebay various stuff I find in the trash. My best flip was a guitar amp I got for $35 at a yard sale and ebayed for $1850, which was sweet, but that kind of opportunity is rare. I especially dislike the way it feels kinda like gambling; I hate gambling! One can't rule out the possibility the stuff is hot, regardless whether from the trash or a yard sale.

I collect Indian head pennies. The only problem is the ones I'm missing are very expensive!

I flipped books from 99-01. Bought in person at library, garage, and estate sales. Sold on ebay. I did pretty good, then got too busy. Average buy was .25-1.00. Average sale was 10.00. I always had to get up at 4:00 or 5:00 on weekends to be first in line somewhere. You have to be able to find unusual books in a hurry to make money at it.

Mike

Cars, Motorcycles, Recumbents, furniture, lawn mowers,
and tools.

Uhh... This keeps me bissiee. :)




JohnnyBee.

I have a friend who used to buy surplus from state auctions. He would buy old computer systems, kitchen equipment and stuff like that. He'd either clean up and flip them, or strip them down and sell the parts that were worth something and send the rest to the recycler. Sometimes one fan from a large system would pay for a whole pallet of gear. He made one major score where a pallet of gear he got for a few hundred bucks sold for $18k. That was rare, though.

Karl

Model railroading (operations-type hobby - collecting the equipment becomes a side-effect)
Railfanning (hobby)
Computer hardware (tinker with)
Hot Wheels (collect/flip, market stinks right now)
U.S. coins (would rather get rid of what I have, come to think of it)

-Kurt

I used to collect and flip baseball cards. Really enjoyed it when my boys were young but their grown and gone now.
The hobby was destroyed by the over production of cards by the manufacturer and ebay though still a pretty hot market is overrun with scammers and crap. I now have boxes of my best and most valuable stored away for my grandkids to have whaen their ready.
I have a few select cards and other items that are worth quite a bit but I find watching the game is much more enjoyable than trying to make money on it.
Anybody up for a hot dog and a beer!

Sailboats!
Sports cars- The cheap kind that don't run well. My specialty.
Degrees

This is how my hobbies went:

Jeeps (large lifted ones meant to climb over rocks and through mud) - cars - motorcycles - scooters- mopeds - and now bicycles.

My next hobby will be shoes, then perhaps, crawling.

Then I'm going to collect babies.

I won't ever collect sperm though. That would be gross.

Yeah, I think it will end with babies.

Pets. My fiance is a veterinarian. 5 pets. 5 bikes.

For awhile I collected (beer) bottle openers. That evolved from my hobby of home-brewing beer, which I haven't done much since my kids were born (almost 11 years ago now for the oldest!). It was cool to pick through thrift stores or flea markets looking for openers with interesting shapes or from obscure mfgs. Then, eBay came around and I saw I could find a gazillion of them, just pay the money. That took the fun out of it.

I also have a nice collection of late 19th/early 20th century handbooks on technical writing and basic rhetorics. That has to do with my day job.

Neal

I used to collect Matchbox cars as a kid, then right before they started getting valuable, my mom sold my whole collection in a rummage sale. As far as flipping stuff, I started out repairing and reselling push mowers in the mid-80s, then early 90s I started flipping old H-1 and H-2 Kawasaki two-stroke triple motorcycles, the most frightening motorcycle ever to be ridden! The early 2000s I flipped computers/parts, which helped me to understand computer hardware support for my job, then came the C&V road bikes just one year ago.

geek

My wife and I used to buy and sell 1960's furniture and stuff - lamps, art accessories, etc. I now have a houseful that I basically paid $0 for. We don't do it anymore because it got harder to find (original owners had mostly died off) and lots of other people started doing it - in fact, prices went so high that we decided to sell most of our "extra" stuff at a monstrous profit. Best pull - I bought an entire set (huuuuge set) of Franciscan Starburst, including some rare pieces, for about a dollar each. We completed our set and sold the rest for a 300% profit.

Good times.

Beanie Babies.
.
.
.

Just kidding...
a few months ago I bought a bike off of a guy who had a garage full of vacuum cleaners. I asked him what was up and he told me " You like bikes, I like vacuum cleaners". Apparently he picks up most of them from the dump and flips 'em for cool craigslist cash.

Old audio equipment.
Good equipment from the 1960's to 1980's pretty well matches the bicycles I collect so it makes the garage sale and thrift store visits more fruitful.

Vintage Cameras.
Watches.


Don

New hobby, huh ? Why is everybody suggesting collecting, it's all the same whatever you collect. Maybe you need something that isn't collecting, like learning to play a guitar, using a metal detector (that can turn into collecting though...). How about creating rather than collecting ? Woodwork !!! No good with your hands ? Do modern art, if you're good at "bull" you'll make a fortune too. All you need is a message. Make the "art" first, work out what it means afterwards.

Rare books. Hence, "Bibliobob." Mainly 20th century fiction and art books. I don't sell much, but I did flip a copy of "The Shining" recently for $350 (bought it for $1).

That money went towards my Geoffrey Butler build and picking up some much needed bike tools. The best part of book flipping money is that I can spend it "guilt free" on the bike habit.

Much like bikes, the internet has flattened the field of book collecting. Whereas it used to take many years of learning to spot the valuable finds, the internet has made that knowledge much more easily available (though the identification of rare books is still not easily mastered). Basically, the mildly rare books dropped in value and the really rare stuff skyrocketed.

Mechanical watches (wind up), fountain pens, and cameras.

I stopped collecting stuff when I got married. I still like to buy vinyl. Bought a copy of "93 KHJ Boss Golden Hits" compilation from 1967. Paid $5.00, turned down $1,000.00 for it. Maybe one of the stupider things I've done. It was my favorite record as a kid though.

I still pick up stuff from the alley to sell on Craigslist. Refininshing a nice old mahogany desk chair now.

Hot Wheels on this side, but the ones that you would have collected:

http://www.jaysmarine.com/hotwheels_redlines.jpg

Excuse the '93 repops mingling with the original Redlines (oh, and that impression of my chompers too).

-Kurt