Thinkpads Forum

Do you guys (who collect) tend to have a bunch of non working machines on the shelf that were used to make others work or complete?

Most of my collection (85% or so) are 100% working machines (including duplicates) and a few parts machines. It seems buying a complete parts machine is more economical then buying parts as needed.

Instead of saying "yes, you're right" I'm just going to say: let's not even go there...

I amaze myself sometimes at the stuff that I find when I'm looking for something...

Hmmm.... I think we have 6 fully functional Thinkpads around here right now. And the parts machine count is probably higher.

I tend to want to fix up parts machines, so I try to keep them at a minimum (cheaper on me).

A while ago I was looking for the eject button on a floppy drive in my 365 486 machine. I ended up getting another 365 machine from ebay ($10 shipped, not bad) that had the eject button. Now I have a working parts 365 minus an eject button, a missing space bar on the keyboard (how did they lose that!), and a plastic chip in the case.

It's usually about 50/50, although right now I have 3 functional, and 1 project.

I tend to keep most of the machines around here working. So it's usually some number to 1 ratio...currently 8:1 working to parts, and even the parts machine will run if I put some time into it. Of the (8) working, (6) are in my sig and the other (2) are used by family members, a T43P and an S10.

I have a box 'o' parts but only 1 non working laptop (a t40p that continues to confound me). I do watch eBay often for parts systems as those tend to be just bad cmos batteries.

I really don't know, I know 1 380 works fine and is missing the battery, I just grabbed a T60 today with a cracked screen and no hard drive or cover some of my 760's may not have battereis the two RISC based Thinkpads I have I think are dead (so those are parts machines) I have two i1200's that are missinf ram doors and HDD's but work but all in all I'd say dang near every thinkpad I have at least has ram and will power on. I have a stack of T4x here that I have not yet cheked so those may end up parts machines or reflow test machines

edited to add I have not really looked at my 701's in years so those may be parts machine. got about a dozen of them.

TTA where do you get all those machines? How come you have so many that you have no idea if they work or not?

I'm too much of a laptop addict...ha..ha..ha...

ALL of my ThinkPads

* Were bought new
* Began life as my primary ThinkPad
* Were kept like new, or as close to as possible
* Are used periodically to prevent degeneration, and to enjoy.
* Ended up being a collection as I simply couldn't part with them at collapsed pricing.

Cheers...

(by the way, the list below is only _some_ of the entire collection)