Cash in on my old 120 spools?

[Newt_on_Swings]

convert them into 35mm adapters and you'll find people paying you big bucks for them.

Oh gosh it's surprisingly annoying to do if you don't have a small band saw to make the cuts for you quickly. It's a pain to do by hand. Plus I think only fuji ones fit nicely with just the excess cut away.

[polyglot]

I donated about 200 of them to a local primary school to use as art materials. They get glued together into monstrous structures!

[railwayman3]

Can't see much demand for 120 spools...are they actually selling? 620 and 127 I can understand, as these are obviously obsolete but reloadable with either 120 or cut-to-size film respectively. (I'm keeping the 620 and 127 which I have, but have so far been putting spare 120's in the plastic recycling bin!)

[David Brown]

I hate to think of all the junque I threw away over the years that now command big bucks.

A couple of decades ago we bought a house that had a whole fence line and two large beds planted in prickly pair cactus! Even knowing that all you have to do is stick a pod of that stuff in dirt and it will root, be plentiful and multiply; we still cut it all down and threw it away.

Not two weeks after completing that painful (literally) task, we were in a nursery and saw what new cactus plants sold for. We probably threw away $10,000 worth of cactus ...

[semi-ambivalent]

A couple of decades ago we bought a house that had a whole fence line and two large beds planted in prickly pair cactus! Even knowing that all you have to do is stick a pod of that stuff in dirt and it will root, be plentiful and multiply; we still cut it all down and threw it away.

Not two weeks after completing that painful (literally) task, we were in a nursery and saw what new cactus plants sold for. We probably threw away $10,000 worth of cactus ...

Not to mention the fruit, the pulp of which can be used to make a tasty margarita.



s-a

[Aristotle80]

620 spools are worth money?

i have a whole jar full. what do they bring? ok, ebay has them for around $5 each, on average.

woopie do. Those folks DO realize every old 620 camera has one in it, right?

They don't all have a spool in them anymore. People are figuring out that buyers want the spool more than the camera, and the spool alone is cheaper to ship. The same thing happened to pre-war typewriters when crafters started chopping the glass keytops for jewlery. I've bought three 620 cameras on ebay in the last year, and only one of them came with a spool inside.

[mweintraub]

Someone buy a 3D printer and start making your own spools of all sizes.

That's a good idea. Two buddies of mine just ordered one. muhahahahaha

[SpunkySpine]

I understand why some people are hot to trot on those 120 spools...

Not so long ago I stumbled upon an article on modifying your 35mm film for use in...
You guessed it... Holga Cameras.

You use the paper backing from a roll of 120 to tape the end of a roll of 35mm film.
The film is turned with the emulsion side to the backing such that the exposure is made THROUGH the backside
of the 35mm film... requires extra 2 or 3 fstops exposure to get a usable image.
The film is hand wound onto the 120 spool and 35mm film is then cut to fit to the end of the paper backing.
Of course, this is either done in a change bag or a darkroom.

Take your fabricated roll of "Holga Special" and load it into any 120 MF camera.
I just might have a go at it someday in my Bronica.

[Denverdad]

Only if you mislabel them and try to pass them off as 620 spools lol...

Oh my, that reminds me of this ebay listing I saw recently. Although the title clearly refers to more than 100 620 spools, I am pretty sure that those are actually just 120 spools in the picture. The buyer may have thought the $172 sale price was a good deal as a resale opportunity, but if they are really 120 spools - well, then not so much!

[Denverdad]

620 spools are worth money?

i have a whole jar full. what do they bring? ok, ebay has them for around $5 each, on average.

woopie do. Those folks DO realize every old 620 camera has one in it, right?

Maybe $4-5 each

I am a little embarrassed to admit this, but I can tell you exactly how much they go for. The answer is $7.25, on average.

How do I know this? Well, for some strange reason (a moment of boredom perhaps) I decided to look at completed sales of 620 spools and calculate how much they were actually selling for. I found about 3 months of sales to average; and having done the exercise twice since then, I can now report the figure above as the average price per spool over the last ~9 months. It encompasses eBay sales of just the bare spools, and only those sold in North America. It does not include shipping costs, although I have statistics for that too. Anyway, here is a histogram of the data: