On Sun, 2 Apr 2007, gudmundur wrote:

Hey folks,

What is going on with the Russians selling obviously defective
junk and representing it as first quality good merchandise??

Of course there are dubious characters at hamfests but this was
just over the edge this year!!

Stacks of CDR drives, Hard drives, all marked 'bad' somewhere
on them and marked $5 each or in that area. When asked about the
drives and not pointing out that it is already marked as 'bad'
the guy replies in crappy english "I have not tested all of these
but every one I tried has worked". So I go out and drag my laptop
in and guess what??? Five out of five random drives I selected
failed completely. Some didn't even spin up. Are these guys
dumpster diving outside a factory repair center or is this the
stuff we sent over to Russia to have disassembled for the recycle
value? Well I also tried some RAM chips. Again, the very bags
these things were in were marked 'Fails memory test'. The seller
represented them as 'good pull outs'. They couldn't have been any
worse if they had been struck by lightening. It is one thing to
say to the buyer "I really don't know the condition, you're buying
as-is", or "I haven't tested it, but if there is a problem you may
choose a differant one until you find a good one". These guys were
blatently misrepresenting garbage as good useable merchandise!!!
We went through this with the Asian wave, then came the East Indian
wave, now it's the former Soviet block ripoff artists.
I didn't get any business cards from the guys but I wish I had.
These jokers will kill hamfesting by causing folks to think it is
nothing more than a ripoff field-day for the un-suspecting and I
really think these less than reputable folks should be reported
to the hamfest commities.

Caveat Emptor is one thing, but this was just outright lies on the
part of the seller. Pity those who are just starting out in this
hobby and looking for a bargin and get scammed, buy foriegn nationals
at that!!

I did find some Ram for my laptop, a 6C5 vacuum tube, a 'point
and shoot' temperature reading device, some doorknob capacitors,
a 21 pin Cinch Jones male-female pair, and an external floppy
drive for a Thinkpad. All these items were in perfect condition
and the sellers (who were not Russian) were more than happy to
demonstrate the first-rate quality of those items. Hats off to
the rare breed of honest hamfester!!!!



I've been going to hamfests for 25-35 years. I've had my share of buying
stuff that was said to be good and it wasn't. Or, it was less than what
the guy said was what he thought it was. I also bought stuff that worked
like it should and like the guy said.

Are you sure your test was under reasonable circumstances? There are lots
of hardware incompatibilities, software driver incompatibilities/glitches,
and they could have been marked "bad" because someone else didn't test
them or install them properly. If you have bad vibes about a deal, don't
buy the stuff. If you saw a lot of stuff marked "bad" why didn't you tell
them "Hey, this word means it will not work, now why do you think its
good?"

I bought computer stuff from thrift stores over the years (monitors and
boxes) and 2/3 of the stuff works just fine, the rest goes into the
garbage can. In the end, its the price of very cheap computer stuff. 1/3
has to go to the garbage can.

I'd rather concentrate on the overall picture (I was at Timmonium,
Saturday) and I thought the tailgater population and the covered space
population was down about 20% from what I expected.

Anyone go both days? Hamfests have been in a slow downward trend for
about the period when the internet started getting popular.