What Dave Auerbach has stacked in his Chicago warehouse is stuff you can’t put a price on.
“I probably have more television equipment than anyone else in Chicago. I don’t even know all of what I have,” jokes Auerbach about the 5,000 pieces of broadcast and production equipment towered to the ceiling in his northwest side Chicago Surplus warehouse.
“Half my warehouse is filled with broadcast and production equipment,” says Auerbach, who migrated into electronic refurbishing and recycling 15 years ago from his original computer surplus business. “Now we’re doing more than ever.”
One of Chicago Surplus’ biggest scores was salvaging everything left by Ch. 2 after 57 years on McClurg Ct. when the station moved to new upgraded HD studios on State St.
“The station left, literally, $5-$6 million worth of standard def equipment in place,” Auerbach claims. “Three $80,000 robotic pedestals, flat panel monitors up the yin-yang, Beta cart machines that cost $250,000 when the came out. Now they’re scrap.
“We took down the lights from the Kennedy-Nixon studio, we took out 40,000 lbs of wire and cable, cameras, speakers, circuit-boards; all the stuff that wasn’t high-tech enough they left behind. It was fun.”
As the economic recession threatens the Chicago visual media industry, Auerbach’s salvage operation also picks from the ashes of collapsed production houses.
“We come in when cost of removal is worth more than the equipment is worth,” he said.
Right now, Chicago Surplus is loaded with good, used equipment for sale. It includes 19-inch racks, generators, zoom controllers, routers, signal effects generators, waveforms, patch panels, routers, nine studio cameras, tripods, lenses, shot boxes, audio mixer boards and much more.
This collection might be crammed among archaic gear only vaguely remembered by gray-haired filmmakers: a McIntosh MC250 amplifier, Super 8 cameras, a Sony EVO-9850, or those quad machines or M2 decks salvaged when from Kemper Insurance closed its in-house studio some years ago.
