Whats the MOST UNUSUAL thing you've found when scrapping?

I thought this question was a natural to ask after seeing the other thread about what the "most common" things you find when scrapping!

My boys and I are avid scrappers. We've picked up a few interesting items in our travels:

-A whole 5 gallon pail of chrome plated solid brass beer keg taps. Probably 100+ lbs worth..
-Complete snowblower. My boys were young and wanted to rebuild it. So we did. Turned out a co-worker in the place I worked at had tossed it!
-Lots of old chainsaws. We found a well-used heavy duty loggers saw- a big Husqvarna- and had enough parts laying around to get it going. That was at least 10 years ago and my younger boy still uses it.
-Near new self-propelled lawnmower. We spotted it outside a dumpster in an RV park. 5 minutes of work on the carb float valve got it going.



I know this is kind of ho-hum stuff for some of you...lets hear what you have found!

Jon.

I've found some pretty odd things in my day. A Nazi ww2 uniform while doing a clean out. On the same job found a bank bag full of old silver coins. I picked it up, and felt the weight. I almost fainted when I looked inside. Driving around saw a pile of metal so I started loading it up. This guy comes out, and says hey I got some more stuff if you want it. I follow him to his pole barn, we get inside It looked like storage for a plumbing company. I say " What is it you want gone?", he said everything. I wanted to say are you sure, but instead offered him money for the stuff. He wouldn't take any money, I tried a few times. I did however the next day leave a envelope in his mailbox.

I found an unopened jar of spaghetti sauce in a computer.

I found 3
Russian watches with a had grenade. Left the grenade

1 100 dollar bill inside a old scanner I picked up on junk day

Originally Posted by robsrecycling

1 100 dollar bill inside a old scanner I picked up on junk day

Looks like some one was trying to counterfit

During a recent e-waste drive someone dropped of quite a few things. One of them was a bill counter. And sure enough, there was a twenty dollar bill still in the machine.

A lead brick full of radioactive material inside a piece of lab equipment

I found $13 in pennies, a good knife, and a cat. It was still alive so I took it out and put it on the ground. Unfortunately no scrap value on it, haha.

Hmmm.. some of the strangest things I have seen scrapped at my yard include:

Prothestic leg
Circuitry from an old missile silo
40 pay phones filled with quarters
And on my father-in-laws birthday I serendipitously found a silver belt buckle with his name inlaid in turquoise.

Hey Kid....There are plenty of places to sell cats for good money for their platinum content.....wait wrong cat, you're right no scrap value. hehe

The oddest thing I ever found is a human spine put together with a long metal rod in the top of a closet in an old house. The closet next to it contained a pistol.....hmmm, I wonder.

That was a good one Pnutfarmer, haha. Thats a weird find, and really suspicious

Black garbage bag of old porn magazines and a sawed off shotgun in the same pile - off to the side of a old farm service road at a undesignated dump site, figured someone had gotten married or moved in a girlfriend and had to dump their stash fast.
gynecologist chair - slightly used.......
TONS of paraphernalia in a single wide trailer in a trailer park we where demoing. In the same trailer park, a trailer an older woman had passed away in, leaving her dogs in there for weeks by themselves, forced to pretty much eat their own feces. The woman or the dogs where not in there, just loads of dog crap everywhere. That trailer was donated to the fire department, that ended up burning it down for a on site demonstration.

A deep freezer full of manikins.

In an older house found a suitcase with a noose in it... same house had a Earnhardt shrine and a fridge with a huge pickle jar with a single pickled egg left in it.

Been scraping since I was 16 in the weird and wild North Carolina, I can write a book about the weird..

At the time when I was pulling the old wire I wouldn't consider it Unusual but today I would. 10 years ago I was doing an electrical job in an old house apart of what they now call "historic down town Fuquay". Every bit of wire that came out of this house and I will never forget what the old man called it that owned the house.
Ended up pulling about 400 pounds of what he called "horse hair wire"(not to mention a god awful amount of not ABX BUT GBX). Nasty looking romex wire but with out the pretty plastic insulation. Instead a nasty black tar looking insulation that looked like someone rolled it in hair while it was still wet.
So...weird or what? (good show by the way) Horse Hair Wire, anyone ever heard of that?