This Samovar urn brought lots of bids and a sale of $717.00!

Ever heard of a Samovar?

This Samovar urn is quite a curious contraption, designed to heat and maintain hot water, tea, coffee, or your beverage of choice.  It contains a central column for hot coals, which heat the liquid in the surrounding reservoir.  This vintage piece is Russian in origin, of brass construction, and still holds water.  The design is elegant and features embellishments at the valve and the handles, and the maker’s mark is written in Cyrillic characters, so we’re not certain the name.  Nonetheless, it sure did bring some exciting action!  This samovar brought 31 bids, for a final sale of $717.00!

Items like this are great examples of why we all love working at Auction Bay.  We may never have come across this piece or any like it outside of work, but learning about the rare items and their history, and the cultures and traditions behind them make for a really fun day’s work!  And we can still be pleasantly surprised at the end of an auction!

This rare saxophone mouthpiece sold for over $1,300 at Auction Bay!

We have a story to share that illustrates what makes selling through Auction Bay worth your while.  This particular item would have been missed, or lost in the shuffle, but for the diligence of our staff.

Our consignor brought in an old Saxophone to sell, suspecting it might be a valuable model.  It was not easy to identify, as the usual identifying marks on the bell were hard to read, having been re-finished at some point in the instrument’s long lifespan.    Our staff is up for a good challenge, and with some painstaking research and scrutiny, we identified the saxophone… and sure enough it was a hot model: an old CONN Tenor from 1928 .  But the $710.00 sale of that old Sax isn’t the story!  The mouthpiece was the real surprise.

Three mouthpieces were held in a compartment in that saxophone’s case, and our lister pursued a hunch and gave them all some research.  The first two were nothing special, but the final one was positively identified as the rare Super TONE MASTER Saxophone Mouthpiece, made by Otto Link.  The resource we used to identify it described this “Double-Ring” model as “The Holy Grail of large chamber mouthpieces”, and further aided in determining its approximate age range and gave Florida as its point of origin (made after the Otto Link company moved from New York).  Needless to say, we separated the mouthpiece for an individual sale, gave it a full set of high-quality photographs, and then listed it and watched with baited breath.  It accumulated over 80 watchers during its week run, and we were delighted to watch the bidding skyrocket, well past our expected sale price, and all the way up to $1,325.00!

Our consignor was thrilled, and thanked us for finding the hidden treasure in his item.  It’s sales like this that show you the real value of an Auction Bay professional eBay listing over a private listing.  We have research tools at our disposal that others don’t, and we have a dedicated and passionate staff who relish the hunt for items like this.  We care about your items, and we take the extra time to make sure they sell for the highest prices the market will bear.  We only make money if you make money, so we make sure each item has the chance to make your fortune.  Want to know more?  Stop into our store, or give us a call at (219) 926-6416, and we’ll help you sell your items on eBay’s worldwide marketplace!

This old Owl Clock brought a $160 sale on eBay!

At Auction Bay, we research items before we sell them, to let us know which keywords to use and get a general idea of how well an item sells.  We seek a consistent sale history on eBay, and employ several tools in this search, but sometimes even our tenacious efforts yield little information.  In these cases, we go by our experiences, and give it our best.  This is one case where it worked beautifully!

We’ve had good successes with antique clocks, and typically the more unique they are, the better.  In this case, when we saw this antique owl clock, we could find no identifying maker’s marks, no particularly searchable characteristics, and we learned that when searching for ‘owl clock’, one finds a plethora of cuckoos, mantel clocks, and all manner of similar items, just not this one.  But we listed it with confidence, and our faith was rewarded with a sale of $160.27!

This clock dated to roughly 100 years old, and was made of brass, but yielded no clue as to its value from a detailed inspection.  Still, we made sure to use title key words which would be as general as necessary to be found, but still specific enough to get attention!  As with most cases, the collectors out there were able to find it, bid fervently, and made our consignor quite happy.