My friend Ron recently retired as an electrical engineer. He's always been interested in electronics and built Heathkits in grade school. Now that he's retired he's been tinkering with things like old radios.

It turns out that the radios are fun to fix, but even with restored cases (his wife is a highly skilled woodworker) they just don't sell well. Nobody listens to AM radio much these days and there just isn't a lot of demand.

So now he has a different specialty - special effects pedals of the type guitarists use to make "fuzz" sounds and such. They're very popular as it turns out, and some models go for thousands of dollars on the used market.

Who knew?



He told me that the round one would sell for something like $3,000. The place to sell them is Reverb.com - who also appears to have taken the used instrument business away from eBay. I've never seen a site with so many nice used guitars for sale.

One thing he likes about working on them is how demanding the users are. He has to make sure uses the exact same parts the unit came with originally or the sound will be different. This means he spends a lot of time rooting around finding old stock of some fairly obscure electronic items.

If you have one of these pedals squirreled away somewhere, dig it out and see what one goes for on Reverb.com. You might be pleasantly surprised!

LL#2 has developed quite the pedal collection. Not the expensive vintage ones, thank goodness, but even the basic new pedals go for $80-200. And they hold their value, so buying used doesn't even save much. He has pretty much asked for nothing else for the last couple Christmases and birthdays and saves up his allowance to buy one every couple months. He and Mr. Lisa built a pretty nice pedalboard to hold them all out of a wooden ikea shelving unit LOL! (got the plans from the internet if anyone is curious!)

Your friend might also find working on vintage synths fun! There are very few people who do it and there has been a bit of a cult revival in collector interest in 1970s-1980s synth technology. Our marching band uses a Korg synth circa 2001 and even that has quite a cult following. I've been trying to teach myself how to fix it as it needs a little work (understandable given that it's almost 20 years old!). I have fixed a few issues, but there are some things I am not comfortable attempting without someone to help coach me through it. What I found is that there aren't a whole lot of places to get something like this fixed and the ones that do exist have waiting lists that are months long. So if he ever wants to branch out from pedals, there's definitely a market in that!

My son accumulated a pretty decent collection of new ones when he was in high school. He's playing in a band again, and I asked him if they were coming in handy. He said they were, but that he'd also built some from instructions he found on the internet.

As far as I know, he has not developed a taste for the expensive vintage ones, though!