I still go back once in a while and love to look at the strange electronics parts they somehow acquired. I definitely love that someone decided to try to collect and sell these things.
Heartbroken to see they’re in financial distress. If there’s any store worth saving it’s this one.
Like you said, so many motors and switches; likely a big part of the reason I do what I do for a living today.
saveitforparts on YouTube did an excellent tour/example video of ax-man [1] which gives a good idea of the type of store ASS is and the vibe. Even if you aren't local to the upper Midwest, I'd highly recommend donating to keep this store alive. It very much fits with the old-school hacker ethos, and keeping spaces like this alive helps preserve that culture and exposes younger people to the idea of DIY/punk/hacker and the ability to repurpose old/interesting stuff.
Side note, I'm surprised that these types of scientific surplus stores have lasted longer in the upper Midwest than places like silicon valley or near bell labs in NJ. They aren't open for retail anymore and didn't have the same sense of humor, but Surplus Sales of Nebraska [2] is also an excellent example from this area of the country. I hadn't ordered since last year, they had held on to a delightful web 1.0 site up until sometime in the last year and are a legit supplier for really oddball stuff.
[0] https://www.ax-man.com/pages/the-nature-of-surplus
A core memory from back then is the big diver’s helmet way in the back at ASS, and wishing I could buy the weird radar screen/oscilloscope boxes that looked like they came right out of a tank. And how every label for every box of parts or object in the whole store had funny hand lettered descriptions that someone spent a lot of time on.
Real estate prices are a big factor. Rents in silicon valley, and I suspect NJ have increased much more than midwest rents. Even if the store location is owned, when the business owners are looking to retire, it's then a question of selling the business with the space or closing the business and selling the space by itself, and the value of the space is probably enough that it doesn't make sense to tie it to a business.
Add a bit of reality that manufacturing and the surplus it generates has mostly left silicon valley and NJ, and it makes more sense to have such a business elsewhere.
A decade ago if you searched for toggle switches on their website you would have gotten dozens and dozens of results.
Now there are six, and only two of them are actual toggle switches.
Did all of the science and surplus run out?
Instead of companies dumping their excess stock on whoever offers to buy it, instead they're dumping it all on Amazon and ebay. A little more work but they get more money for it, meaning that there is less new overstock to go around.
I hope they make it, we need more stores with personality like American Science. I plan on making a trip out that way now that I know where it's located.
Like the guy who wrote the linked article, a GoFundMe for a for-profit enterprise rubs me the wrong way. However, I just donated because of all the great memories they've provided me and my kids. Seems like those of us that like these things may need to pitch in from time to time.
I wonder if something like this could have helped Lindsay's Publications, who went out of business a decade ago. I have so many fantastic books from them. They're really worth a HN post all on their own.
https://makezine.com/article/workshop/lindsays-technical-boo...
I would suspect (hope) many have been "archived" at "the org".
(EDIT: I see for example "The Impoverished Radio Experimenter Vol. 4": https://archive.org/details/impoverishedradi0000lind/mode/2u...)
It should. They should be selling shares. The Green Bay Packers are similar.
The reality is that with these electronics things it's not just 20 or 30% cheaper to buy online, it's often 1/10 the price or better. I can order a 10 pack of pin headers for $1-2 from China and each of those headers costs 50c at my local shop.
Suburbanization set up the US for failure here, and the governments haven't bothered intentionally creating any equivalent of Shenzhen. Santa Clara county used to be the spot, and I'd regularly pick up quickturn PCBs in person. Still can, but if you're in SF you're probably going to wait for next day shipping unless it's super super important, in which case it could come from any domestic CM.
RIP https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6495767,-79.3925583,3a,77.4y...
Anyone from the area should check it out.
I was there last week (in town on business), and I found a Vector 3677-2 protoboard for $2!
This is my Bay Area resource for electronic parts in a pinch.
As a kid I would browse their website endlessly, just fascinated by all the weird stuff. It scratched the same itch that watching Mythbusters would scratch. In adulthood I rediscovered them and went to their Milwaukee location for the first time. We spent hours there, looking through all the cool stuff they have. It really gives you ideas!
Their website doesn’t have it, but the handwritten joke signs in the store are the best.
https://sciplus.com/screen-protectors-2-15-16-x-2-1-4-12-pac...
https://sciplus.com/under-powered-automatic-can-opener-for-p...
https://sciplus.com/lifesize-terra-cotta-warrior/?searchid=1...
> And the business was launched as American Lens & Photo.
> After the Second World War the company expanded, fed by war surplus. Eventually, Al opened a retail store on Chicago's Northwest side called American Science Center and started carrying educational science items.
> (...) In 1979 he started a catalog operation under the name "Jerryco" and in 1981 he opened a second store, in Milwaukee.
I have never figured out what it is.
However, tbh, ASS isn’t that great. I wish it was better. Weirder. Larger. People have been posting about other stores such as Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale, and tbh, that was way more interesting on the tech side. I’ve got some milsurp bags there I like, and occasionally an electronics part or two, but it’s just ok. I bought a pretty nice vacuum there once too. So I’ll miss it if it goes, but I kinda get why.
Truly an awesome store. Filled with very eccentric shoppers.
Plus, who doesn’t want a life size 6’4” terracotta warrior for their house to silently take guard? You call it landfill, I say it’s whimsical and fun. Would a Halloween mask that brings a lot of fun also be something you’d consider landfill suited?
Obviously I'm sorta biased in that I don't enjoy this type of thing myself but I get other people enjoy it. I've seen countless places I enjoy disappear over the years but I don't think any of them deserved to be begging for donations on the FP of HN.
*wavy flashback transition*
As a kid from Michigan, I grew up reading the Jerryco catalog and asking my parents about weird phrases therein, which is how I learned all sorts of cultural references that were, in retrospect, probably not what most folks expected their young children to be asking about. I also learned a lot more context than I got from the dry, factual descriptions in the Edmund Scientific catalog. (Or the Lab Safety Supply catalog, for that matter. I evidently really liked reading catalogs.)
To this day, I have a tote labeled "Bottles, boxes, and bags", after their catalog section.
So when the family took a trip to Chicago, we did a bunch of touristy stuff that I don't remember in the slightest, and also a side-trip to the Jerryco store. It was heaven, it was Mecca, it was Woodstock, it was a candy store, it was a hands-on science museum, all these things at once and more. I devoured it -- a physical tactile experience reflecting the vast weirdness and limitless possibilities of the catalog! I wanted one of everything but had to restrict myself to a few handfuls, because I was 8 and had no money and my parents didn't have much either. With parental and staff guidance, I picked out some stuff I thought might be fun to play with -- some solar cells (exotic tech in the 80s!), a couple switches I liked the feel of, some motors, who knows what else.
Those are the items I remember because, years later in my teens, those different types of solar cells were the foundation of an award-winning science fair project testing their efficiency under different types of light. In my twenties, one of those rocker switches, still kicking around my parts drawer, ended up being the perfect size to replace a failed switch in a spotlight I was repairing. In my thirties, one of those motors snuck into the back of an engineering demonstration that needed a bit more grunt than the stock Lego motor could provide.
Three decades of engineering usefulness, from one trip at age 8. Beat that.
I've visited one other time, in 2012 or thereabouts, to the Geneva store. It wasn't quite as vast as the store in my memory, perhaps due to the whole "growing up" thing, or perhaps Geneva just isn't as big as Park Ridge. But it was every bit as magical. Packed to the gills with obscure stuff, quirky signage and decor, and tempting prices. And I could see other young scientists and engineers prowling the aisles, getting their hands on surplus that cost some business megabucks when it was new, turning these weird mechanisms over in their hands until they made sense, synthesizing new uses...
It's cheaper to buy the new stuff from Shenzhen than the old stuff.
I've consulted for similar size businesses, and shipping integration was always the reason to not support international shipments. Send them an email, you'll almost certainly hear back from a real person and if you let them know what you want to order they can probably make it happen.
