Long live American Science and Surplus | Hacker News Reader

Long live American Science and Surplus

milwaukeerecord.com

394 pointsthinkalone112 comments

I went to one to help me with an idea for a 7th grade science fair when I was a child and the staff helped me figure out which items I needed, which included a bunch of electronics parts and motors I had no idea what I was doing with. They patiently and very enthusiastically explained to me how they worked, how to safely use them, and gave me encouragement on my ideas for the project. They thought it was a cool idea. I was really blown away. I went on to win that science fair but honestly could not have done it without their help.

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.

They helped me out for my 8th grade science fair! I wanted to build a shake table to simulate the effects of earthquakes on buildings. (tl;dr: the taller the building, the more flexible it is. At least according to my experiment, which did get me a place at the state finals.) They helped me size the motor and even had an AC one I could plug directly into the wall. This was the Geneva location.

The 1980s catalog equivalent to AS&S as a youngster was Edmund Scientific. Magnets, motors, solar panels, various electronic parts as well as science kits and telescopes. Really a fantastic resource for a budding scientist.

Completely flabbergasted to see one of my favorite stores of all time at the top of HN. This place is an absolute gem and I have countless childhood memories of visiting the Milwaukee Av location.

Heartbroken to see they’re in financial distress. If there’s any store worth saving it’s this one.

I ordered motors and pumps from that catalog as a kid. Can you imagine I used to love going through the stuff they had on a paper catalog!

In person you could also see their supplies of sodium and potassium in sealed glass containers. I always wanted to get my hands on those.

Like you said, so many motors and switches; likely a big part of the reason I do what I do for a living today.

I actually specifically made a trip to Milwaukee 1/3 for the Harley museum and 2/3 for ASS (that acronym was definitely deliberate). I've enjoyed my visits to ax-man surplus [0] in Minneapolis enough that when I heard about a similar store it was enough to justify a 500mi weekend bike trip. The stores are very similar, but anyone lucky to live near their store knows that the inventory changes enough that each visit is a unique experience and you won't see the same things twice.

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

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-uJPIhAUu4

[2] https://www.surplussales.com/

When I moved from Milwaukee to Minneapolis I was happy to find Ax-Man existed, but to be fair I’ve only made it in a couple of times. I hope there are still 15 year olds that are amazed when they walk in like I was.

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.

I haven't been to Ax-Man in years, despite the fact that I drive up Snelling, past University at least once a month. I have to make the time to stop there one day.

Were there ever surplus stores like this near Bell Labs in NJ?

> 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.

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.

AS&S survived for decades selling actual science and surplus, now it seems their focus has shifted to alibaba junk consumer goods and flea market reject merchandise.

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?

The demand ran out. Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t know how this stuff works.

What a ridiculous comment. Of course lots of Gen Zers know how electronics work. The oldest Gen alphaers turned 15 this year.

I'm guessing the surplus ran out. I would go to the Chicago area stores a lot and could easily recognize which companies were dumping spare/reject assemblies and other shrapnel related to their work. Those companies all moved to Mexico or Asia, so there's nothing left to dump.

That sort of happened with Army surplus stores too for largely different reasons. Don’t even know of one around where I live any longer.

There's more competition and no real need for companies to do online or reserve sales of their surplus. They might have been able to place orders or holds previously.

The "surplus" at AS&S was more about manufacturing surplus. Spare parts and bulbs, loose switches and chips, wires, unpopulated PCBs with mystery origins, etc.

I'm not familiar with the science surplus side, but on the militaria side the answer is basically yes. There absolutely is still a ton of surplus but it's nowhere near as cheap and limitless as it used to be.

Aside from everyone else's replies, there's also the fact that the niche is smaller now.

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.

These were my go-to guys for sciencey stocking stuffers at Christmas for my kids. Their catalog was always a joy to read, with excellent puns.

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...

Lindsay retired. Not quite the same. I still miss them though, many interesting books and well currated

Scored a lot of Lindsay's books when you still could (lot of build-your-own regenerative receivers and similar, reprints of "The Boy Mechanic", "5 Acres and Independence", etc.).

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...)

This is a great recommendation, thanks! I've found a lot of interesting old radio hobbyist magazines on the Archive, whose copyright has expired. While it's great to see how people could get stuff done with the very limited electrical resources available in the 01910s and 01920s, many of the designs depend on materials that are now hard to find, while materials that are now easy to find (like PN2222s) didn't exist.

We have a big and ongoing focus on amateur radio right now thanks to a grant from ARDC and really hard work by our awesome Program Manager Kay Savetz. Worth checking out: https://blog.archive.org/2022/11/16/digital-library-of-amate... https://archive.org/details/dlarc

Thanks! I had no idea! Your work is one of the three or four most important projects sustaining civilization right now; it will be profoundly missed when it's gone.

> a GoFundMe for a for-profit enterprise rubs me the wrong way

It should. They should be selling shares. The Green Bay Packers are similar.

Yeah, why aren’t they?

Maybe they don't want to be forced to run their store for maximum profit in the future.

just issue non-voting shares like all the cool tech companies

We used to have the most amazing little electronics store a lot like this called "Ra-Elco" in SLC, Utah, but specifically devoted to every wild bit of electronics you could imagine, ranging from individual little components of every sort all the way up to weird esoteric devices nobody's ever heard of (at least there were a lot I'd never seen before). Totally love these kinda shoppes, and I truly wish they weren't such a dying breed. :(

I like these places too but I can see why they are dying. The number of SKUs people want has exploded and the cost competition from buying online is unreal. Recently I needed a motor driver in a hurry (a4988 or equivalent) and decided to visit my local electronics shop. They wanted $9 for it (plus tax), which I was willing to pay, but were out of stock. So I went home and found a 5 pack of the exact same part for about $10, shipped from the US.

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.

This is a benefit of having ultra dense industry specific zones like the Shenzhen SEZ. Physical vendors get the volume to warrant operating and reasonable pricing, buyers get components on short notice.

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.

This doesn't really solve you problem, but they did just open (or about to) a Micro Center in Santa Clara.

May 30th, just a few more days!

Wasn't there already a Micro Center in the AMC Mercado Plaza, by that church on Great America?

Not for a long time now - closed in the mid 2000s I think.

The public's (lack of) tolerance of pollution also impacted things. It's not like PCB manufacturing is clean.

PCB manufacturing isn't that bad, semiconductor fab is very nasty. It was nasty an unmitigated way during the birth of silicon valley, check out a superfund site map if you're bored.

https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?layers=c1229e...

Is it just about having dense industrial zones? I would have imagined cost of labor to be the major cause of price differences.

A lot of the cost of silicon valley labor comes down to extremely high housing prices. A lot has been made of how the tech boom was simply a wealth transfer from investors to bay area real estate + homeowners.

Sure but even if you exclude Silicon Valley, the minimum wage for a US worker must be a fair bit higher than the equivalent non-US worker.

The US used to have its own SZ in lower Manhattan. They were abandoned when Japan did things cheaper.

I tried to go to AS&S a few times working on projects. They never had what I needed in-stock. It honestly feels more like a toy/knicknack store rather than a place where you can get things you need to build or repair things.

My understanding is that Ra-Elco essentially moved to Standard Supply after the building burned down. I haven't checked it out myself yet so I can't confirm.

I dunno, but I do know that Standard Supply has a lot of the items I generally need and / or seek out when I'm visiting such places, so that's all good for me. I still miss Ra-Elco, but as long as I can buy the right parts locally when I'm in a real hurry to grab some important little widget or gizmo, that's what matters most to me. Especially important since Radio Shack is no longer at all that kinda store (and hasn't been for many years now).

We used to have Electronics Warehouse here in SoCal (Riverside) I miss them but admit I would rarely go. Selection was definitely better than Radio Shack, but catered to an electronics era my personal designs had grown away from.

I think this is another challenge for these kinds of stores. The market moves on and their inventory becomes obsolete. So you end up with a store full of BCD thumb wheels and tube sockets and wire wrap materials that very few people want to buy. They'll never recoup the investment in these things because they've become obsolete. Even more modern things have the same problem - if you bought a pile of Arduino Due-s or BASIC Stamps to sell good luck moving those today.

There used to be a place much like this in Toronto called Active Surplus. Sadly got kicked out as rents rose on Queen Street.

RIP https://www.google.com/maps/@43.6495767,-79.3925583,3a,77.4y...

From what I know it still exists further out of the city. I have a friend who picked up quite large amount of scientific equipment. Might be a similar store with a different name though.

Loved the store, and the mailer as a kid. Really inspired me to build things. Really wish more stores like it still existed. Anytime I'm back in MKE, it's one of my first stops.

Same here! I make a yearly pilgrimage whenever I'm in town visiting my parents.

Oof, i'll be donating big to help out. My partner's from here and i visited for the first time last year. Its fantastic. Half kitschy weird science stuff, but half genuinely fantastic maker materials at great prices. Salvaged air pumps, motors from GMC electric seats, super high load bearings, all kinds of stuff that is at the intersection of obscure, extremely useful, and difficult to get on Amazon, especially at a reasonable price or small quantity.

Anyone from the area should check it out.

Back in college we'd buy various lab glassware from AS&S for, uh, collegiate uses of glass. Need to hold things in place and heat them with precision on a budget? This is your store.

Anyone know a way to find stores in other areas with this kind of spirit? Weird Stuff in Sunnyvale used to feel a bit like this to me.

Halted was similar, but they're also gone :/

Oh, damn, I didn't realize they were gone. I used to like shopping there, but they started to seem less fun as time went on, and the last couple of times I went it seemed to have lost those positive/creative vibes.

It's not exactly the same, but for folks in the Triangle (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill) area of NC, there is The Scrap Exchange[1].

[1]: https://www.scrapexchange.org/

Ax-Man Surplus in MN. https://www.ax-man.com/

I visited that place a couple of months ago, it was fantastic.

Axman Surplus in MSP

Electronic Parts Outlet in Houston, TX

The Reuseum in Garden City, ID

https://www.reuseum.com/

Bookmarking this, I can't believe I didn't know about this place when I lived there (although that was long enough ago they might not have been open).

Jameco in Belmont, CA jameco.com

This is my Bay Area resource for electronic parts in a pinch.

Skycraft Surplus in Orlando: https://skycraftsurplus.com/

I was there last week (in town on business), and I found a Vector 3677-2 protoboard for $2!

This was always my go to, and a large source for movie-making:

https://apexsurplus.com/

I hate how few responses there are to this.

Is this their online store - https://sciplus.com/ ? May be some shopping help them?

Yes, that’s it.

This is the coolest place! I'm so sad to see they're in financial distress.

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!

This fundraiser is important to many at HN, and I think it would be good to consider having some new category of HN like “pinned” for important things that shouldn’t fall off quickly and allow users to suggest a moderator “pin” a post. Similarly pinned things would have “unpin” and a sufficient number of unpins would signal to moderator to unpin it. I’m worried that not everyone will see this because of the normal cycle of posts. You could argue that the current way works well for most things, but pinning is an important part of most forums.

I just donated - the world is a better (and weirder) place with this store in it. If you live in the Chicagoland or Milwaukee area, you should check it out.

If you’re anywhere near Minnesota, this store has exactly the same vibes as Ax Man Surplus: https://www.ax-man.com/collections/all-products

Their website doesn’t have it, but the handwritten joke signs in the store are the best.

What a wonderfully weird store. If I ever need to buy an under powered can opener,some screen protectors for my palm pilot and I life size terracotta warrior for $1200 without going to multiple places I know now where to go.

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...

Almost all the surplus stores are gone. Those that owned their place in a depressed warehouse district lasted the longest. Then they based their existence on the USA tax code. If they made1,200,000 electric things = 100,000 a month = sell to meet orders. Orders drop and they had 20,000 left and parts for the next 100,000. At year's end they can write them off - but can not keep them as written down parts = mandatory third party selloff. Surplus dealers would buy them at 5-15% of cost and sell in want-ads in several weekly mailed papers. Electronic Buyers news (EBN) is one I recall. 10 tabloid pages of all stuff. In the late 80's the internet arrived and by 2005 all these tabloids were gone. Then when manufacturing went to Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and China the sources all collapsed. In addition, surface mount and LSI as well as programmed chips, meant used boards became useless for most - few had the hot air chip pullers. I was a member of Hacklab in Toronto = hacklab.to = a hacker shop you pay by the month and they have all types of machine tools, solder/desolder, laser cutters, filament printers,programmers work stations etc, but most use good laptops, Apple, x86 and linux and assorted single board small like raspberrypi etc. Even they buy from Ali express or one of the parts shops online, like digikey.com Times have hanged. I used to buy from ASS. I went to the ASD show in Las Vegas every year. Still going, less electronic surplus, more sell off goods. https://asdonline.com/about/product-categories/

Easily the best store I've ever been to. Unfortunately the nearest one is ~an hour drive, so I only visit once every couple of years, but it's always a good afternoon.

I knew them as Jerryco in my childhood:

> 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.

Years ago, my spouse thought I had marked an item in a sciplus catalog and so bought it for me as a birthday gift. I unwrapped it to find a plain brown box with an L-shaped metal fitting of some sort with a single black insulated wire that’s terminated with a spade lug.

I have never figured out what it is.

Maybe to ground a metal workbench?

We need a photo!

Alas, I have long since misplaced or discarded the item.

Sounds like a plumbus

I just bought some stuff from them last month, have been a customer for decades. Will be donating.

I have spent many afternoons going to Lost World of Wonders, American Science and Surplus, and the thrift next door is decent too. Maybe cap it off with mediocre tacos at Taqueria Buenavista, or go to West Allis Cheese and Sausage. Fun times in west Allis.

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.

I used to know the lady who managed the one in IL.

Truly an awesome store. Filled with very eccentric shoppers.

There were at least two in Illinois.

The one in St. Charles then.

The title meant as if a wish for science in America to live longer, and that is also subject to so much target of late. Long live American Science institutes and their surplus of curiosity.

I understand lots of people have some pleasant memories....but.... While I didn't know what American Science and surplus are, based on looking at the website they are peddlers of various "store to landfill" junk. Like lots of nostalgic things I'm sure its sad to see it go but it doesn't appear to be the loss of anything significant and doesn't seem to be worth "saving".

A quick search shows lots of vintage/ex-military “surplus”/parts. Microscopes and optics abound. There are lots of collectors and nerds who’d be happy to buy a pump or an encoder or whatnot (Chris Boden from YouTube, maybe even Alex from Technology Conmections - would be delighted.)

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?

Yes I understand all that. There are countless places that provide that type of whimiscal fun for whatever you are willing to spend. Why does this one need special treatment and a gofundme?

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.

Donated. Sciplus (under their old name of Jerryco) was a significant part of my upbringing, whether they realized it or not.

*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...

So many surplus stores are gone. Silicon Valley had HSC, where Steve Jobs bought Apple's first oscilloscope. They closed in 2018. Weird Stuff Warehouse closed in 2018. Edmund Scientific in New Jersey closed in 2001. Electronic Surplus [2] is "temporarily closed for maintenance. Fair Radio Sales in Lima, OH closed in 2023.[1]

It's cheaper to buy the new stuff from Shenzhen than the old stuff.

[1] https://fairradio.com/

[2] https://www.electronicsurplus.com/

AllElectronics in CA, too. I bought out their 10k dual-taper A/C pots during their closing sale; an unusual but powerful taper for audio electronics.

Post probably here because I mentioned it in a comment. Should make a big post-fire purchase.

Their printed catalogs were a work of fabulous, goofy, zany art. Great store

It's a pity they don't ship to other countries than the US. I looked through their website and saw some fun stuff, but no international shipping.

Send them an email asking for a quote. For a small business like this, I'd expect they can probably ship it to you but the complexities of quoting shipping internationally means they don't have it on the site. Yes, shipping APIs are readily available, but implementing them costs more than the shoestring budget they likely have for the site and would also require integration with their inventory software. I'd be willing to gamble that they are likely using a homegrown WMS that is a combination of excel sheets and several layers of scripts from former and current employees who can write code but aren't professional developers.

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.

Good to know, thanks for the explanation!

Remember my dad taking me here all the time and being amazed by aisles full of bins of random parts. Made you want to tinker.

Oh man, some of my happiest childhood memories are wandering around Geneva sciplus. WIll donate to save it!

Nugatory Contrivances is a way better name imo. But ya, long live them.

Whoa! MKE on the front page is epic!

I found out about sci-plus from the other Milwaukee staple, red letter media. Not sure which episode, but I could find it with grep if needed.

note: Best of the Worst： Ben and Arthur [Xto-7_xWb9g]

Anything like this in New York?

Tangentially related: SCRAP in SF is looking for a new location.

https://www.scrap-sf.org/newhome

The Best

I’ve always loved places like this. A bunch of weird little parts that feel like digging through a forgotten treasure chest. Every time, it’s like unlocking a small piece of the world. Really hope they can keep going. These kinds of imaginative little corners are getting rarer and rarer these days.

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