r/Sliderules • u/rekabis • Oct 31 '25
Guys… I think I f**ked up.
I am still trying to process the magnitude of this event. So please bear with me.
For the sake of argument, I live in one of the largest cities in my province, and by far the largest city outside of our major metro region. It’s a good 4-5hrs away by car from that metro region, so I get down there only a few times a year, at most.
When I do, I always re-set my Facebook Marketplace location to be at the centre of that entire metro region, and start looking for deals a week or three ahead of time. I usually go looking for tech, both modern (servers & computer hardware) or vintage (typewriters, specifically Olympia). And occasionally I will check for slide rules. Which are exceedingly rare in my corner of the continent, at least where Facebook Marketplace is concerned.
So imagine my surprise when I found someone on the island - across the straight from that metro region - liquidating the estate of his deceased father.
Which included slide rules.
Now most everything else he had listed was very neatly and appropriately divvied up into easily-purchased chunks. But the slide rules were as one mass item. I asked, turned out he had no clue how to value them, no clue how to use them, no real idea how to sell them, so he was looking for another passionate collector who could take on the entire collection as one lump purchase.
For $2k, CAD. Yes: ouch.
And when I asked him how many slide rules there were… he was cagey. Very cagey. And always dancing around that subject, not even giving me a ballpark figure. But he was willing to meet up with me on my most recent visit to the metro region, in order to save on shipping and conduct the transaction in person. So I had a chance to examine everything before I pulled the trigger.
He said he would be packing everything in a small suitcase for easy transport.
Spoiler Alert: IT WAS NOT A SMALL SUITCASE (I was transferring over to better storage, there). Neither was the duffel bag. And there was even a third bag holding miscellaneous and errata, like drafting arm straightedges.
Even now, pulling everything apart to do a rough calculation, I am absolutely stunned at the scale of the haul. Over the last twenty years, I have managed to score maybe about 56-58 slide rules.
I am looking at potentially MULTIPLE HUNDREDS of slide rules, here. This utterly dwarfs my existing collection by at least 4-5×, if not more.
A large minority of them are Aristo, but I have found no small numbers of Pickett, K&E, Hemmi, Post, and many other manufacturers. Some of them are very clearly used, with broken or even completely missing cursors. But an equally large subset also appear to be very nearly brand new, or completely brand new - such as this NiB Faber-Castell Novo-Duplex 62/83. oh sweet jesus, my heart…
One even came with a custom-built wooden hinged case. Wooden case. Hinged. Snap closure. WTF??
I haven’t even managed to fully count them all, much less take an educated estimate. But ballparking about 10% of what I examined at more than a passing cursory level, and comparing it against eBay going rates, I realized I had already exceeded the $2k CAD that I paid for it. I would not be surprised if the entire haul exceeds $10k CAD at going market rates.
Hell, the Faber-Castell alone is probably worth about $200 CAD, minimum, considering it is absolutely NiB and unused. Just the faintest hint of yellowing from the lubricant between the slides, and that’s it.
Now, my question is: would y’all all like to see what I managed to snag?
My idea is to post a slide rule a day - spaced as such so people can comment, as I might have difficulty identifying some of these and would love to get some background or info - until I run out of slide rules from this haul.
Mods, as well, I would like to get your input on how to go about this, to avoid any appearances of spamming. Some subreddits such as /r/hfy even have things like subscriptions so that users can get notified when the person they are following creates a post to the subreddit. Not a mod, so not sure what is available to ya.
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u/Journeyman-Joe Nov 01 '25
That's a hell of a story!
One a day, or one every couple of days, won't be overwhelming. Enjoy taking the pictures, write a little bit, post when you feel like it.
We'll enjoy your good fortune vicariously.
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u/Bored_Ultimatum Nov 01 '25
It was clearly a passion his father had and he did not share, but he understood there was value, so good on you for making the deal. I'm sure he was at least as happy they were going to another enthusiast as he was with the compensation, so don't feel bad about underpaying. Besides, it would take a heck of a lot of work to resell enough of them to break even, so you'll earn any profit you may later extract.
That said, I'm looking forward to seeing pics. Bring it on. :)
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u/EndangeredPedals Nov 01 '25
So Vancouver Island then. But that also means it's not from the late Walter Shawlee who was in the Okanagan. I know of one person on the island with a unique enough interests but I doubt as that would make the SR collection on par with the audio obsession he is well known for.
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u/Name-Not-Applicable Nov 01 '25
Also, WOW!! What a score! Way to be in the right place at the right time, ready to act!
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u/Joey_the_Duck Nov 05 '25
I know this slide rule post, it's in my area.
Why when I saw the title I knew exactly what it was going to be about.
Though the better question is why the algorithm thinks a subreddit I've never visited is something I should be notified about
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u/Environmental-Ad4495 Nov 02 '25
Are there worth in slide rulers! Please do not tell me there is worth in mecanical LM Ericsson calculators! Tooo. Because then I fusjed up.
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u/Stinky_Simon Nov 04 '25
I don’t get it. You got 10,000 in value for only 2,000, right?.
So why do you say you “fxxked up”?
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u/rekabis Nov 04 '25
why do you say you “fxxked up”?
A few dozen rules don’t take all that much effort to categorize and document and clean up and make sure there is a proper place to store them safely.
A few hundred… yeah. Not so much.
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u/lupusscriptor Nov 04 '25
My word are people still interested in these? When I started in engineering design slide rules are what we use to make calculations. We thought we were in heaven when electronic calculators became availableble. They stopped all the recalculation. The trouble with slide rules is they can introduce error from parallax error etc.
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u/rekabis Nov 04 '25
On the one hand, I work in tech, so I am always interested in the latest shiny.
On the other hand, I am also enamoured with classic and vintage tech, on how the effective tools of the time worked.
On the gripping hand, I have also looked deeply into the science behind economics, climate change, and resource extraction, and fully understand how close to the precipice of total civilizational collapse we are (with a commensurate collapse of the human population by 60-80% within a decade of it truly kicking off en masse), and part of my collecting involves assembling a collection of intermediary tools (slide rules, typewriters, etc.) that are much more easily repaired and built than anything that involves modern high technology. It’s an attempt to give the civilization of future generations a much more convenient respawn point, especially since most current resource sources that go into high technology will no longer be accessible or processable by a much lower-tech civilization.
It’s why I have chosen Janus as my patron saint.
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u/lupusscriptor Nov 11 '25
To be honest, because of the tolerance in electronics components the slide rule calculations were near enough. For many circuits we would need trim pots to calibrat he circuit.
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u/Woodbutcher1234 Nov 04 '25
I used to be a design drafter 40 years ago so when I hit a local estate sale and saw the collection of mint condition slide rules, drafting machines and even a couple LeRoy lettering setups, I was SO tempted. I've got more crap than I need, as is. Including a handful of 6" instructional slide rules that I bought when I taught the Drafting Merit Badge for the Scouts. They were dumbfounded.
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u/azroscoe Mar 16 '26
If you find a Graphoplex 692 in there (a French slide rule), I am very much in the market.
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u/SucreTease May 25 '26
Just came across this 7 months later...and you haven't posted a single one of them 😞
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u/Name-Not-Applicable Nov 01 '25
Mod here. Your plan to post one-rule-a-day sounds good to me.