Flat files, map & drafting cabinets, card catalogs and mail sorters — free pickup in Albuquerque

Flat files, map and plan cabinets

Flat files outlive the offices that bought them: the drafting room went to CAD, but the cabinet stayed. Oak or steel, one section or a stack, I want to hear about it.

• Oak flat files and blueprint cabinets from Hamilton and other early makers; stacked sections on a base.
• Steel flat files: Mayline, Safco, Stacor, Hamilton, Globe-Wernicke, Art Metal, Steelcase and others.
• Vertical plan files and hanging-clamp plan racks (Plan Hold and similar).
• Map cases from surveying, mining, oil-and-gas and engineering offices.
• Architects’ reference tables.
• Artists’ and printmakers’ flat files — and the studio gear that goes with them: etching and litho presses.

Drafting tables, stools and the drafting room

• Drafting tables: wood and cast-iron bases; crank, counterweight or tilt tops (Hamilton, Mayline, Keuffel & Esser, Dietzgen, Stacor).
• Drafting machines and parallel-rule boards (Vemco, K&E, Bruning).
• Drafting stools and chairs (Toledo, Cramer, Harter); cast-iron-base shop stools.
• Instrument sets, slide rules, planimeters, pantographs, beam compasses and lettering sets (K&E, Dietzgen, Post, Riefler, Kern) — more in technical instruments and manuals.
• Surveying transits, levels, theodolites, rods and tripods (K&E, Gurley, Berger, Dietzgen).
• Task lamps: Luxo, Dazor, O.C. White — more on vintage & industrial lighting.
• The office’s steel desks and cabinets — vintage furniture pickup.

Card catalogs and multi-drawer cabinets

• Oak library card catalogs. Look for a maker’s label such as Library Bureau, Gaylord, Globe-Wernicke, Shaw-Walker or Yawman & Erbe.
• Steel index-card and check files; Kardex-style visible-record cabinets.
• Parts and small-drawer cabinets: machinists’, watchmakers’, dental and specimen cabinets; Vidmar, Lista and Lyon modular drawer cabinets.
• Hardware-store bin cabinets.
• Spool and thread cabinets (Clark’s O.N.T., Merrick, Corticelli); seed and apothecary cabinets.
• Printers’ type cabinets — type cabinets and job cases.

Mail sorters, post-office boxes and mail-room pieces

• Oak pigeonhole mail sorters (wire-mesh or wood-backed cubbies), sorting desks and slant-top sorting tables.
• Mail-room cubby walls from offices, schools, hotels and churches.
• Brass and bronze post-office-box doors with dials or keys, and whole mailbox banks salvaged from renovated buildings (if a bank still holds the carrier’s arrow lock, that lock is installed by USPS — ask your post office about it before the bank comes out).
• Brass mail-chute boxes and lobby letter boxes, door mail slots, cast-iron and brass wall mailboxes.
• Postal scales, cast-iron letter-copying presses, desk letter sorters.

Not mine to take, and not yours to give: USPS property

Anything marked as USPS property — mail trays and tubs, hampers and carts, sacks and satchels, the blue collection boxes — is federal property, and I won’t pick it up. USPS asks that its mail equipment go back to a post office or your mail carrier; you can also reach its Mail Transport Equipment Service Center at 866-330-3404. The same goes for anything still owned by a school, library or government office: it goes through that agency’s surplus process first, and I pick up from whoever owns it after that.

What to photograph

1. The whole cabinet, front and side.
2. One drawer pulled out.
3. The maker’s label: inside a drawer front, on a drawer side, on the back or the base.
4. The outside width × depth, and the number of drawers and sections.
5. The way out: stairs, doorways, an elevator.
6. Damage: bent drawers, missing pulls, water stains.

Text the photos to (505) 250-3804 with your ZIP and any deadline.

Big and heavy: the honest part

A big flat-file section is often wider than a doorway, and a steel one with the drawers in is very heavy. Leave it assembled until I see the photos — if I pull drawers to lighten it, I label them so it goes back together. Tell me the stairs and doorways and I’ll say honestly whether it’s something I can move. The city of Albuquerque is my usual area. Rio Rancho, Corrales, Los Ranchos, Tijeras and the East Mountains are case by case, and Bernalillo, Placitas, Algodones, Los Lunas, Bosque Farms, Peralta, Belen and Edgewood are usually out of range.

What I don’t take

• Ordinary modern office furniture — laminate or particleboard desks, everyday filing cabinets, cubicle panels: an office-furniture liquidator or a paid hauler. Habitat ReStore takes some furniture in good shape, but not particle board or office cubicles — call to confirm.
• Diazo (ammonia) blueprint machines and their chemicals.
• Confidential drawings, client files and records: pull them first. Old printed maps are different — leave them in for a photo.
• Anything marked USPS property.
• Broken, rusted-through or water-swollen pieces. Plain steel is still scrap — scrap metal pickup.

When these turn up

• A retiring architect, engineer, surveyor or draftsman — see clearing out a parent’s house and estate cleanouts.
• An office closing or moving — architecture, engineering, survey, oil and gas, print or art studios: business closing pickup.
• A school, library, church or old office-building renovation, once the pieces have cleared surplus.
• An estate, the leftovers from an estate sale, or a storage unit: estate-sale leftovers, storage unit cleanouts.

Tell me the lease-out or closing date and I’ll say honestly whether I can make it.

Where it goes

Flat files go to architects, artists, printmakers and map collectors; card catalogs, parts cabinets and sorters go to collectors and people fitting out studios and shops. Afterward you get a Reclaim Receipt.

Text me a photo of the cabinet → Or use the request form