Fun Finds From the Flea Market!

For a Saturday morning excursion, my wife, son, and I decided to meet up with a friend of ours and his Dad at the local flea market. We got there early so I could hit up the card vendors before we met up with everyone else.

First stop was a familiar store but in a new spot. They had a bunch of quarter and dime boxes, including one that was nothing but Reds. Here's what I scored after a quick surface dig ...

I'd completely forgotten that Vince Coleman wore a Reds uniform so this was a pretty nice find. According to Baseball Reference, he played 33 games for the Reds in 1996 for a team that didn't really light the world on fire. These 96 Fleer cards also had a weird feel to them. It's hard to describe but sort of like a papery feel, not sure how else to phrase it.

Some 93 and 94 Leaf cards. I always liked the backs of 94 Leaf as they had a fake ticket stub listing the lower level of the stadium on there.

Two very nice 1994 Flair cards.

Couple nice throwback cards, one Topps Heritage and one Fleer Tradition.

The rest of the batch. Overall, this was a pretty good haul from a Reds dime box that I'll definitely have to dig deeper in next time as these guys were moving their whole brick and mortar store to the flea market.

Moving on, I stopped by my regular vintage guy. Unfortunately, he didn't have what I was looking for this time but he did have this box of 91-92 NHL Pro Set Series 2 that I procured off of him for a mere five bucks. He mentioned he was moving his whole store to a spot at the flea market in a few weeks, which should be pretty epic.

There will be more to come on this later.

Last card store I checked out was a place that was clearing out what was left of their sports card inventory as they were moving their store more towards Magic and gaming cards and the ever growing universe of Pop Funko figures. They had giant stacks of open 3,200 count boxes and said to dig through whatever I liked.

Again, a quick surface dig procured these five cards for a buck ...

Three nice hockey cards. I really like the Pavel Bure card as it's an old Upper Deck ICE card.

Two random vintage Pirates cards in a quarter box? Yes please! When I have some free time, I'll be back to dig through more of their boxes as there were at least 20 boxes to go through.

This was a very successful day at the flea market and I'll definitely try to be back soon to see if I can find more hidden gems like this.

Frankenset Update!

Been meaning to post about this for a while now, but I've finally finished one page of my Reds frankenset.

Here are the fronts ...

And the backs ...

Yes, I'm aware there is a double dip of '95 Leaf on this page. It works until I can find a substitute for either card.

In the tradition of set building, I've decided to split this up into series and work on it that way as that will make it more manageable for me. Cards 1-300 will be series 1 and thats what I'm focused on now. I've also posted a new page for my set needs including the remaining numbers I need to finish series 1 of my Reds frankenset.

Speaking of frankensets, I've got tentative plans for a second one with the working title of "junk wax frankenset". That should be fun so stay tuned for that. First though, I'll need to pick up some pages and another binder from the card shop.