my dad would dive for tshirts at the salvation army. i know they're only like $.25, but he would get like 30 of them at a time, wear them once at his job at a gas plant & toss them because they were so greased up & destroyed.

i've got you beat. an envelope containing $101. also lots of misc bike parts that went to the coop i used to work with. lots and lots of food (there have been times i've lived for weeks almost exclusively off of dumpsterdiving); clothes, furniture, quirky odds and ends like the 60year old space heater that looked like an alien death ray, a passport, prescription drugs, wireless cards, computers, working iPods, more food and clothing...

heh, the girl unit and i have lots of food in the house, very little of which we've paid for. several dumpsters have yielded a ton of food. so much that's good gets thrown out in this country.

I'm in Indiana, where we're currently getting more snow than the people here can handle and everything is closing, I think it may be a perfect time to dive...

Whoa. :O

ehhh not really. i forget the specific title of the law but it basically says you can't stay still for a certain amount of time (20 seconds or something like that).

I know, right? Hit the beer dumpster, the nut dumpster and the tape dumpster and good god damn, son...you've got yerself a soirée.

Apparently dumpstering in the Milwaukee is hard to do. I wandered around this area that had a Panera and an Einstein Bagels in one complex. Goldmine, you would think, right? There were cameras on the dumpsters. I was so disappointed. If anyone in Mke has any advice, I'm pretty much out of money and I don't want to eat my roomie's food unless it's necessary

are cameras really that much to be worried about? theres a globe one at the panera dumpster here, so i cant see where its pointed, but even if i am caught on camera, what are they going to do, have a stake out to wait for me to come again?

I must have missed that day at how to live on the cheap in PGH school.

Wanna help a brother out with some beta? I got other mouths to feed. i'll even haul some stuff home for you on my Xtracycle...

i'm planning on going down for little 5 week then going to the derby that weekend.

who are you btw? shoot me a PM.

...dumpster soirée... I love it!

why didn't you send me one first? haha... you got one.

the idea of the panopticon has this effect: if you think you're being watched, you won't do what they don't want you to do. it's the going theory behind fake video cameras. in fact, lots of security systems have video cameras with nobody watching the screens.

even if they are, so what? is there a posted no tresspassing sign? what's the legal problem? i wouldn't worry too much. go and be cautious the first time, see if anything happens (probably won't).

I used to work at a hotel that threw out a ton of stuff- dudes would dive every day, and the only problem came from them tossing stuff out and leaving it on the ground. As a result, The Man put a padlock on it.
SO DON'T MAKE A MESS.

I regularly dumpsterdive behind a cabinet shop near my house. I climb into their big wood disposal/recycling containiner and sift thru the wood that is destined to be recycled into some sort of paper product i suppose. I built a large oak cabinet almost entirely out of dumpster wood.

at my old apts i found 2 working nes w/20 games, cords, sleaves, the works. both worked fine. eventually sold em.

i got a set of 70s speakers. can't remember the make. i looked them up at the time i got them and they retailed for 1600 for the set when they were new. together they weighed close to 150 pounds so there would have been no way to pick them up on a bike without a huge trailer. easily the best sound i have ever heard and at 100 watts i can pump the volume high enough to unshelve books.

a quite out of date log of my dumpster hauls;

www.pinholedumpster.com



at the local tip shop (not quite the dumpster as someone else scavenges then sells) I picked up a magnesium frame merida 909 which i'm somewhat hesitant to build up considering the crackability of it all (no obvious cracks) and an alloy iron horse something (great singlespeed all tipshopped/dumpstered except the chain and bits out of the stash) plus a bunch of other stuff for $10 AUS (?$6 us)
if i can get a fork and headset cheapl enough ill do the merida to see how it goes but i dont want to spend any money on a potentially cracked mag frame.


re:mess
from the first time i went diving with my friends i knew: leave the dumpster CLEANER than you left it. more likely to remain unlocked that way.


all this makes me keen. i think ill ride my xtracycle to my girlfriends house tonight. she lives <100m from a good dumpster...


lance

I was walking home drunk from a bar one night and spotted a dumped Free Spirit. The tires were flat, but I only had to go three blocks so I rode it home. I put it up on my repair stand in my living room then went to sleep. I woke up the next morning, having completely forgotten about my "find," saw the bike, and said out loud, "What the **** is this?" In my drunken haze I didn't realize what an absolute pile of rusty, dirty garbage the thing was. Pretty much nothing was salvageable. Crappy frame, crappy components, and it was dirtying up the apartment. So I brought it out to the sidewalk and left it leaning on a tree. Two days later it finally disappears and a week after that I see it on craigslist.

nice! did you buy it?

i just brought home an 80's cannondale "sh400" road bike from a trash pile down the street. aluminum frame. aren't aluminum frames from the 80's crappy anyways?

the wheels are in good condition and the cranks are sugino. i haven't had time to check it out further.


but hey, it's free, right?

I have heard of a mythological bike parts dumpster in North Carolina where you can drive down, fill your car up with thrown out parts, and make a few hundred dollars on ebay. Supposidly there is an entire punk scene living off of that dumpster alone. Certainly a modern-day fountain of youth. Has anyone heard of this?

yes, a couple kids stayed at my friends place and they each had a sack full of parts that they got from dumpstering that place. i'm talking about high end carbon stuff. i couldn't believe it.

the chips isle in a grocery store caught fire, filling the store with smoke. Everything in the store had to be thrown away. Some of the stuff was smoke damaged, but all the canned goods were fine (including the kegged goods). So out it all went. Some of the more opportunistic fraternities rounded up people with pickup trucks and raided the dumpsters. Pickup-truck loads full of 100% free kegs, various bottled beer and wine (no liquor in grocery stores in VA) left that dumpster in about an hour and a half. Then the police wised up and there was a guard on the dumpsters until they were taken away by the county. I was out of town, but saw the spoils first hand.

All I need to know is which place has those 3 seasons? 2/3 of the year sounds fun