Saturday, March 12, 2022
The sale of my Vibroplex collection — at least part of it — continues. Right now it seems like the sales on eBay are on a down cycle, with prices lower than they were a year or so back.
NAMEPLATE BOOGIE. In my years of key collection, one little change that took place at the end of World War II was in the brass nameplates attached to Vibroplex bugs.
Prior to the end of the war, the serial numbers were stamped into the brass from above. This was the way the numbers were stamped from the time the company began using that nameplate about 1921.
But about 1945 and into the early 1950s, Vibroplex moved from stamped serial numbers to embossed serial numbers. See photos below.
After the mid-50s, Vibroplex returned to be the prior practice of stamping the numbers. Doesn’t make those keys more valuable, but it does make them a very unique block of Vibroplex keys.
There’s no rhyme or reason in regard to which keys I’m putting up for sale. I pretty much grab the ones easiest to get to, dust them off and take photos. I have four more to list this weekend.
SELLING STRATEGY? I’m not interested in maximizing the return on my investment, its more about reducing the number of excess code keys I have in a large, mostly unmanageable collection.
Ideally, I’ll end up with my favorite, collectible and interesting keys. I’ll keep all of the 100th Anniversary keys, some of the early keys, the ones that are in mint condition. But not a bunch of them. And I have some very nice keys, like a Les Logan 500 new in the box, etc. and some Hi Mount coffin bugs new in the box.
I’m focusing right now on selling my surplus Vibroplex keys and some of my homebrew keys, Les Logan, Hi-Mound, etc. Later I’m going to sort thru my McElroy keys and decide which I want to keep.
The problem I’m running into is that each key I pull out seems to trigger thoughts of “well yeah, I want to keep this one.” Unfortunately, I can’t keep them all, hi hi.
One the keys I keep, I’m going to include approximate sale values to at least give my family an idea of what the keys are worth. That’s the plan, anyway. God only knows how many valuable keys have been swept off shack tables into garbage cans of Silent Keys.
73 es CUL …. de KY4Z …. SK … SK …. (dit dit) ….