OK, I've been telling you people, especially the ones that have expressed interest, that there is money to be made in the Legacy equipment market. That's easy to say, but, now, I'm going to give you a case study.
I had a gentleman from Wisconsin call me this passed Wednesday who got the URL from another client of ours that we did some repair work on their Tandy Model 4 computer that runs their sign-making operation.
Seems that this telecom company this gentleman works for has some Legacy gear that runs some process that is essential to their operation and the computer driving it was getting a little flaky and he was looking for a replacement Pentium 1 unit.
I had him create an account and send me a picture of the board he was concerned with and it was immediately apparent, to me, that one of the DIMM sockets had several badly bent pins.
He also mentioned that the motherboards fit into an open frame "card cage" that had been designed as part of the machine, so, a specific size board was required and that he had bought a couple of boards on FeeBay. One of the boards didn't work and the other didn't fit. I had him measure the orginal board including the distance between mounting holes.
The board turned out to be a standard Baby AT form factorwith AT connectors, so the one that didn't fit, as I mentioned to him, was probably a Dell, HP or Compaq board that had non-standard dimensions and spacings. It turned out to be a Dell.
He needed a board that would take a 128MB DIMM and had a blank one for expansion, had, at least, a 233 MHz MMX processor, had, at least, 3 PCI and 2 ISA slots for the cards they used and had to have a BIOS that was current enough to let them use 32 GB of the 40 GB HDs they were using.. He also needed a PCI VGA card as the AGP one they were using didn't sit in the slot right when it was screwed down.
So, out of 38 Socket 7 boards we had on hand, only 2 match all the requirements.
He wanted to know if we had any 40 GB hard drives as well, so, I had hom check to see just how much hard drive space he was using. It turns out that they were using about 1 GB.
I told him that I had some 8.4 hard drives that would do just fine and he could recover the 40 and 80 GB drives they were using 1 GB of to use in other equipment.
Now for the numbers;
The machines that these compoments came out of were, probably a couple of clones that cost me about 15 buck each. Testing (as a unit, 16 at a time on one workbench) and tear down cost me, probably, about 10 bucks, picking, research, assembling and pre-ship retest cost me about another 25 bucks each, so, my total cost, was 50 bucks.
My sale price to the client for a Socket 7 board, an AMD K6-2/333, HS&F, 128MB PC-133 DIMM, an 8.4 GB HD, a low-end PCI video card and a DFE-530TX NIC was $150.
He elected to get 2 complete sets, so, since both with assembled and retested together, brought my total cost to $65 and my total selling price to $300 (plus shipping).
He said he was glad that there was a company like mine that would find, thoroughly test and configure the equipment he needed as it saved im, time, money and aggravation and that he knew of several other departments that would be ordering spare systems of various "classes" over the next couple of weeks.
So, a $235 profit on a $300 sale. I also gave him a discount because he bought two systems.
That percentage of profit is about average for us and the people that buy off the site or request custom systems are MORE than happy to pay it because they get exactly what they want (we ask a lot of questions and a lot more needs emerge) and they know, from word of mouth and our attention to details, that what they get will work perfectly.
So, as I said, there is money to be made in the equipment that is actually peripheral to your hobby.