What Else Do You Collect Besides Marbles

[Ric]

26 minutes ago, joesmarbles said:

. . . every child gets a magic quarter and I get a million dollar smile, great investment....

It sounds like you're earning great returns!

[joesmarbles]

I have been giving my money away to children for more than thirty years, funny thing is I have more money now than I have ever had! Very strange.

I guess that saying" cast your bread upon the waters" works sometime.....Joe McDonough

[cheese]

I collect arrowheads, old coins and cool stuff found while metal detecting. I have a stamp collection but I stopped collecting back when they started making so many different stamps every year that nobody could keep up with them.  I used to collect minerals, matchbooks, matchbox and hotwheels, star wars stuff, coins, old fishing lures, boy scout memorabilia, antique automobile advertisements, old toys and anything else I could find.  I had to narrow it down a bit and focus on a few things I really like and let the rest go.

[jeeperman]

On ‎2‎/‎24‎/‎2016 at 5:28 PM, J_Ding said:

Cichlids rule!  A friend of mine used to have a KILLER cichlid tank...then he built a reef.  I can't even keep a cactus alive.

They can be fun and beautiful  and are certainly a ton of work. two of those are 9 inches.

[cheese]

I've got a cichlid tank too. These pics are old, there are a lot more fish in there now.  There are a lot of fish in the tank during these pics too but they used to hide all the time, which is why I got a lot more fish... to keep it stirred up.  Now I have a bunch of baby yellow labs in the tank from a hatching... anybody need some yellow lab cichlids?

[jeeperman]

Nice, mine is all Hap and peacock. Soon to be all Hap I think. Nice to see someone else with plants, not easy to do with plant destroyers.

[cheese]

Yeah.  I've learned the key is to have plenty of them and not types they like much.  I have success with eelgrass, amazon swords, and even anacharis.  Hornwort does okay and java ferns do really well.  I have a natural bottom too but to keep them from making huge holes, I put good sized river rock all mixed in so that they can't dig too much.  

[disco005]

On ‎2‎/‎27‎/‎2016 at 3:27 AM, cheese said:

I collect arrowheads, old coins and cool stuff found while metal detecting. I have a stamp collection but I stopped collecting back when they started making so many different stamps every year that nobody could keep up with them.  I used to collect minerals, matchbooks, matchbox and hotwheels, star wars stuff, coins, old fishing lures, boy scout memorabilia, antique automobile advertisements, old toys and anything else I could find.  I had to narrow it down a bit and focus on a few things I really like and let the rest go.

I seriously understand this cheese. I actually hadn't really been a collector until about 12 years ago.

Before eBay, I collected Hot Wheels, and had so much fun doing it. When I joined eBay, I thought I realized the potential and pretty much grabbed everything at estate sales and tried to make money at it. All of a sudden I was an antique watch collector, a milk glass collector, a vinyl record collector (mostly the 45's), a walking cane collector, a cast iron bank collector, an antique clock parts collector.......... Until my dining room turned into a storage unit. And at that point I realized - what a mess. ........ Stop.
I was enjoying the search and then the research and selling. Until I came across marbles. I found the usual pinkish based swirl marbles and was trying to id them. While I was researching them, I came across an eBay auction , a blind auction, of a "tube of vintage marbles" with a Buy It Now price of $5.

When I received the tube of marbles, I was so excited to try and identify them, at that point, I had scoured my local book stores for marble identification books and read every page. I decided on about 10 of the recently acquired marbles from the "tube" that they were Peltier NLRs. I took several photos of them and put them in a Marble ID forum, for which I SO NERVOUS  

Turns out, I was right! I was so excited that I had correctly identified them, but I was still in the buy and sell mode. I sold them.

There is nothing I regret more in my marble history than that. I received a great profit from them because I asked Marble Alan to sell them for me, which he did wonderfully. When I brought them to him, I said I thought one had a tiny thin line of oxblood running through it, which it did. He sold that one marble separately.

Once they were sold though, I looked back at the crazy estate sale I had purchased initially and spent so much time on and hadn't been able to identify...... and fell in love.

I started searching out marbles like crazy, I started going every Saturday morning to garage sales, asking if they had any marbles they would like to sell, and I'll tell you, parents have no issues selling their kid's marbles lol. I bought so many current/recent marbles, but it was okay. I wanted everything marble.

I became hooked.

I'll tell you all at this early point in my collector life, I came across a photo series of one of our collectors here, and became seriously inspired. I collect now, and for pretty much the last 11 years, Akro Agate. Love them and the variety that is. It never ends.

(By the way, my Hot Wheels collection ended when my house was burglarized and they took three large tubs of my very hard to find Hot Wheels. That ended Hot Wheels for me.)

Glad to be here. Love this community.

 

[cheese]

Dang, I hate to hear about the Hot Wheels!  I traded most of mine for marbles.  When I was a kid, I was on a trip to my grandparent's house.  While we were there, my mother found her marbles from childhood and gave them to me.  She gave them to me not expecting much, but she told me they were old and special, etc... etc... and so I saved them.  We then moved from the city to the country and the kids in my neighborhood played marbles, which I had never done before.  I was good.  It wasn't long before I had amassed a pretty good collection.  I kept mom's separate though and she saw my interest and got me an early Everett Grist book about old marbles.  It mostly had handmades in it and didn't give much value to machine mades, but I started collecting.  I found a fractured frog sulphide at an antique store in town for $2.00 (the book showed it could be worth hundreds!!) and the hunt was on!  I've been hooked ever since and the fractured frog sulphide is still in my collection.  I took a haitus for several years but always kept the interest.  I did a lot of arrowhead hunting and metal detecting but I came back to marbles a few years ago and have been hard at it ever since.  

[disco005]

That's a really nice first "hook" find. A sulphide for two bucks in whatever condition . It would be nice to have a collection that one of my parents had as a kid, sentimental value is so much more. 

I metal detect as well, my first good find was my very first day. I found an 1889 Morgan silver dollar on the beach. Seriously hooked. And nothing even remotely close since  but still very fun and a good excuse to get out in the sun and sand.