For over 20 years I have been buying collections large and small from Scouters that were ready to get out of the hobby or just needed to pass their stuff on. Inevitably I would end up with dozens of plastic vinyl or poly pages that these items were stored in. I don't know if it was the old Ecology Director in me or not but I just could not force myself to dispose of these pages. For years and years I accumulated them (sometimes tried to give some away) until they eventually filled a half dozen banker boxes.
Vintage Scouting Memorabilia On eBay
I spent several days sorting out these pages by manufacturer, size and condition. Some of these I have in a giveaway box that I will take to future Scouting events to share with youth collectors just getting started. Others I could easily use as part of my Trade-O-Ree set up in order to sell items. But what I needed was a heavy duty card so that the patches could look good in the page and give me a back-to-back way to utilize space. So I decided to manufacture my own blank cards using the familiar 110 pound grey card stock that Best Hobby Pages is known for.
I created the cards for the common pages that I had 6-pocket Scout, 6-pocket square, 4-pocket and 2-pocket. Most everything that I will put out at a TOR could fit in those sizes of pages. The other huge stash of recycled items that I wanted to use was the old Brush Creek Trading Company (now called PPS) envelopes. Since many collections in the 1990s were stored in these over the years I have accumulated maybe a thousand of each size. So going with the same idea I've manufactured a card that can be used in the popular 2-pocket and 3-pocket envelopes from back in the day.
I made all of these cards for my own personal use but it made sense to order them in such quantities that I could also offer them for sale on the website. The other perk was that the Blank 6-Pocket Scout Card is actually designed to fit the Best Hobby Pages 6-Pocket Scout Clear Page. This was something that I always thought made sense to offer and now it's a reality.
All this week my auctions ending nightly are OA conclaves. I organized a half dozen boxes of these recently and am auctioning them off 25 each night on eBay. This week I also have a 125+ large group of better quality OA ending on Sunday.
As time goes on I am always on the look out to add new products or manufacture them from scratch for the hobby. If you have any fresh ideas send them over and I'll take a look at it. Not everything is feasible because of the high cost of shipping items but that hasn't stopped me so far from adding some new products to the mix.
Keep Calm And Scout On,
Jason Spangler Hot Finds Newsletter
In Charlotte, North Carolina I have an antique mall booth that is filled with nothing but Scouting stuff. I call this location my clearance center because I've marked down everything to move. A lot of what you will find there are items that are too bulky to easily ship from an Internet store. The booth is located in The Sleepy Poet which is a well established antique mall on South Blvd in Charlotte. The mall is open 7-days/week year round. So the next time you are in the area come check it out.
I spent several days sorting out these pages by manufacturer, size and condition. Some of these I have in a giveaway box that I will take to future Scouting events to share with youth collectors just getting started. Others I could easily use as part of my Trade-O-Ree set up in order to sell items. But what I needed was a heavy duty card so that the patches could look good in the page and give me a back-to-back way to utilize space. So I decided to manufacture my own 
