These machines have one assignment: Obliterate anything that has managed to remain intact after sloshing down miles of subterranean pipes, sifting through filter screens and soaking in harsh chemicals.

They do a fabulous job. Rocks, bones, keys dropped through sewer grates all become dust in the whirling steel teeth of these beasts. Let loose in your kitchen, a Muffin Monster could dice 100 pounds of potatoes in a matter of minutes without so much as a hiccup. But you probably wouldn't want to try that after you smelled a Muffin Monster's breath, and therein lies the rub.

There's not much of a future for a machine that has spent its life eating a county's collective effluence. Or at least you wouldn't think so, until you saw a Muffin Monster sell at a King County surplus auction.

Turns out that if you're an obsolete piece of government property looking to be rescued from the scrap heap, the surplus auction is the place to go. No matter how strange, useless or foul-breathed the thing may seem, at these dusty events, it has a shot at salvation.

It's an earthly salvation, the type that happens only at the hands of a certain kind of people. These are people who make it their business to pick through the detritus of modern society, searching for bargains, beauty, possibility and profit. The kind of people who will bid on a box of rusty bus chains if they can get the right price. People who can turn an old incubator into a trendy shelf unit, or industrial innards into sculpture. People who look at a discarded crane-operator's chair from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and say to themselves: "I want that!"

People like Uncle Ira.

When he is "picking," Todd Werny looks for clean lines and classic forms. These old Motorola radio units and this aged ironing board caught his fancy - in his imagination, the radio units become shelves and the ironing board transforms into a trendy table.
Uncle Ira reaches into one of the boxes in his barn and extracts a handful of mice, their tails twined like creeper vines.
At a University of Washington surplus auction, Uncle Ira's mother, working as his proxy, outbid Thomas Cusworth on this holograph machine. Months later, Ira has yet to figure out what to do with it, though he likes its lasers. That's typical, Cusworth jokes - he says he would have made something out of it by now.

The premise is this: Nuclear war has caused civilized society to collapse. Lawless thugs terrorize those who still play by the rules. And Max drives around in a powerful car he has built from busted vehicle carcasses and discarded hunks of equipment, an enforcer of his own peculiar brand of justice. Uncle Ira loved Max's car, always wanted to build one himself. To this day, he harbors a fantasy of creating something like it, something forged from the leftovers of civilization.

In college, Uncle Ira started shopping for government surplus as a hobby. And as a way to make a little cash. This was before he got his nickname from some computer hacker friends, who liken his collecting habits to those of a crazy uncle. Back then, Uncle Ira was just Ira Moser, another computer-obsessed engineering student at the University of Washington. One day during his surplus dabblings he bought 32 surplus modems from the phone company for $10. Later, he found someone willing to pay $5,000 for them.

That was "a big swat," Ira recalls fondly meaning he made a huge profit.

He dropped out of the UW in 1987, moved into an old dairy farm that sits on 30 acres next door to his parents' house in Monroe, and began making a career out of buying and selling surplus.

"It's just like gambling," he says. "If you buy something and make money on it, you're hooked."

Ira is a sturdy man with a face that hasn't felt a razor since the late '80s. He can talk for hours about "infrastructure," which to him means the insides of the stuff that makes the world go the computer cables, circuit boards, screws, bolts and wiring that most people blissfully ignore.

This stuff litters his property, clutters his house and fills his barn, which is like a giant purgatory for salvaged surplus a purgatory where even that crane-operator's chair, with its cool joysticks and switches, has waited years for resurrection.

Ira admits he is a packrat of the highest order. But the way he sees it, all this stuff is either part of his dcor, part of a project he's been meaning to get to, or part of the merchandise selling on his Web site.

"It's a rare occasion that I can buy something new in a store," he says.

His kitchen table is surplus. The 68 computers he has run, all at once, in an effort to help his hacker friends crack a particularly stubborn code all of them are surplus.

From his back deck you can see his fleet of seven surplus trucks, one of which he used for bringing home four 6,000-pound camouflaged "ground power aircraft units."

Step through his kitchen, clunk down into the basement, and you'll find one of Ira's prized possessions: a 2.5 million-candle-power spotlight from a tank, also surplus. Listen as he tells you how he sometimes shines it across the valley at night, in the direction of an ugly new tract-housing development.

Now, head for the barn. When Ira's property was a dairy farm, the big white barn was used for storing hay. These days it holds gobs of excess government goods.

"Nature abhors a vacuum, right? You got too much room, you fill it up."

Much of the junk that fills his barn is unidentifiable, clattered onto pallets that line the dirt floor in seven distinct rows. But ask, and Ira will be happy to give you a tour of one row's treasures:

Three 80-inch, multi-scanning computer monitors. A water still. A security-gate control unit. "This is a q-switch for a laser," he will say, as if everyone knows what a q-switch is. A black sink. A box of computer cable. Another box labeled "computer debris." Laptops. A fan blade. When he comes to the TV stand designed to be mounted on a wall, he will say, "I was going to use it in my house, I just never got around to it."

Ira uses that sentence a lot. It is the sign of a surplus addict, someone who sees potential in so many discarded things that his life has become consumed by buying them, carting them home and heading out to the next auction. Little time is left to realize the dreams of transformation these objects once inspired.

On down the row it goes until finally, at the end, big orange plastic coils.

"Fiberoptic interduct," he will explain. "I've had that for too long, too. I thought I'd use it around the farm here to run computer cables . . . I got so many projects."

	In search of tinkering material, Thomas Cusworth sticks his nose into a box of the state's old business.

The answer: No one knows, but it's a whole mind-numbing lot.

Every day in this country, some branch of government is coming to the realization that it doesn't need something anymore, be it NASA deciding to get rid of old beakers or a fire department in North Carolina ditching an old truck.

The size of the government-surplus universe mirrors the size of the government bureaucracy that creates it: hard to grasp, even harder to count. But for a sense of it, consider the list.

The list is printed, double-sided, on sheets of crisp, white paper that stand 6 inches high when stacked. It contains only some of the things that King County owns. To make this cut, the thing has to be worth $1,000 or more.

Eventually, nearly everything on the list will become surplus. And when that happens, according to county law, the items will be given to charity, sent to another branch of government or sold at auction.

King County is one of 39 counties in Washington. Washington is one of 50 states in this country. The list of King County's possessions is 2,000 pages long and includes revolvers, concrete saws, ovens, metal detectors and backhoes. The first item is an articulated bus; the last, a 40-foot steel container.

University of Washington auctioneer Anne Eskridge works the crowd.

All this wrapping up in plastic is a smart way of getting unwieldy objects to stack for display, but it also has the effect of making a government-surplus warehouse look like a vast refrigerator cluttered with leftovers. Which, when you get down to it, is basically what a surplus warehouse is.

The auctioneers, like your mother trying to pitch last week's tuna casserole as tonight's main course, try to make it all sound appealing. But they often find their audience filled with upturned noses.

At one UW auction, the crowd refused to bid even $2.50 for a pallet of used specimen jars. Auctioneer Anne Eskridge joked: "I don't blame you."

Ira suspects that often, the government is just hoping someone will pay to take out its trash. But trash is in the eye of the beholder, and people who covet the strangest things show up at these auctions.

One Saturday morning not long ago, Nyssa Baugher and Mike McCracken got into a bidding war over a green 1979 Ford van that, in a previous life, had been used to teach disabled people how to drive. This van had moss growing on its windows and green shag carpeting on its floors, walls and ceiling. It had a wheelchair lift, which neither of them needed.

As the bidding began, a man jumped in and turned the van's ignition to prove the rickety thing could actually start. It did, but so did its windshield wipers, smearing a pine-needle and dirt tapenade across the glass.

Mike wanted the van so he and some friends could drive to Burning Man, an artsy, licentious festival held each year in the Nevada desert: "We could pimp this thing out!"

Nyssa wanted it to cart around her manacles, furs, belts and pouches. She sells these things at gatherings of medieval enthusiasts, like herself. And she outbid Mike at $600.

No one who regularly attends surplus auctions would be surprised that manacles and the Nevada desert were among the motives behind the battle over the dirty green van. True, most of the purchases at surplus auctions are made by men hunting and gathering boring stuff like medical equipment and computer components stuff that has an established resale value. But anyone is welcome at the auctions, and people with bizarre and creative ideas turn up, drawn by the possibilities. In the end, it is simply the money that counts. No matter how kooky the reasoning, he who throws down the most cash walks away with the goods.

"If somebody is willing to step up to the plate to buy something, it's not my job to question what they're going to do with it," said Darell Green, the state's auction manager for 25 years. "They just have a better imagination than I do, I guess."

	Once a month, in a dusty government warehouse in Burien, the state displays its surplus wares: chain saws, peanut butter, elementary school chairs and lots and lots of computers. Even the chair beneath the auctioneer is for sale, for $1.50.

This is why surplus auctions lack the allure of yard and estate sales, where the items tend to have more style and the customers are a bit more hip. You go to yard and estate sales looking for retro clothes, old books and cool furniture. You go to government-surplus auctions looking for overhead projectors, Plymouth Acclaims and chainsaws.

You also go to government-surplus auctions if you are the kind of person who can look at, say, three surplus ticket machines from a city-owned parking lot and not see a stylistic void.

Todd Werny is that kind of person. He bought those machines as part of his continuing effort to finance his rock-star pursuits. His band is called Diamond-Fist Werny, and his day job is called transforming surplus junk into trendy furniture.

These particular ticket machines, which he is leaning against with his worn motorcycle-club T-shirt hanging loosely over his vintage red corduroys these ticket machines, he will gut and make into shelves.

When Werny goes out "picking," which is just about every day, he watches for clean lines and evocative forms. Much of what he sees is just plain ugly.

"The only reason I do well is because I sometimes do buy things that are ugly and use the part of them that isn't ugly."

An incubator becomes a storage chest with shiny steel framing and a plastic floor that glows orange. A public-school blackboard becomes a coffee table with wooden legs bolted neatly to its green face.

He also looks for furniture that needs no refurbishing, and sometimes, when a government agency is updating its aesthetics, he scores. The very thing that makes an old chair unpalatable to an agency trying for a more modern look is what makes that chair valuable in the trendy furniture stores on Capitol Hill.

To fund his rock-star pursuits, Werny makes hip furniture out of other people's trash. The parking-lot ticket machines behind him used to belong to the city of Seattle. He plans to turn them into cabinets. The lamp, which he uses to light his room, once lit a Boeing warehouse.

Werny can resell a metal 1960s desk at a store like Capitol Hill's Area 51 for several times the $20 it might go for as surplus. People may expect government offices to look current and efficient, but they will pay top dollar to get the opposite look in their private spaces. Chairs from the '50s, lamps from the '60s, couches in shades of green and orange that seem only to have existed in the '70s Werny theorizes that we associate all this retro furniture with a less-complicated past.

"A Formica table, at least, makes me think of a simpler time."

So in his apartment, where he builds his goods, hip old chairs hang above the amps and keyboards. When he has guests over, he makes room by shoving into the shower two surplus garbage cans he's refinishing. And like Uncle Ira, he marvels at how easy it is to become a junk junkie.

"It's just impossible to stop," he says. "Number one, you become reliant on the money."

But it's more than that. "On a deep psychological level," he says, "you get addicted to actually fulfilling this need for searching and finding. It's so exciting. It's like a treasure hunt all the time."

THE HUNTING can get competitive.

"Ira got me on some stuff a while back, and I just bet it's still sitting there in his barn some big laser stuff."

That's Thomas Cusworth, who is still smarting from a UW auction this past summer at which Uncle Ira's mother, bidding as his proxy, snatched up a giant holograph machine.

Thomas and Ira are friends, and the ribbing is good-natured. But Thomas jokes that unlike Ira, who is still trying to figure out how to unload the holograph machine, he'd have done something with it by now.

What Thomas would likely have done is tear the machine apart with his friend Jeff Tangen. The two of them share a love for tearing things apart, and have become allies in the scramble for surplus. At auctions they bid together and then, like pirates, take their plunder back to Jeff's place and divide it up.

When Thomas and Jeff first met they were adversaries, bidding against each other on a pallet of old laboratory equipment. But that was before they knew each other's stories.

In 1982, Thomas dove into a river in Spokane, hit his head on a rock, broke his neck and lost the use of his legs and his fingers. He doesn't like to dwell on that. His triceps still work "a little bit" and both biceps work well, and between those muscles and his wrists, Thomas is able to drive, race, play rugby and fuss with his African gray parrot, Paco.

What he dwells on, lately, are the wheelchairs he builds for paralyzed athletes, like himself, and the motorized parts he needs for his shop, where he bends and cuts steel into aerodynamic forms.

Those parts are why he wanted to tear up the lab equipment.

Jeff, on the other hand, thought the equipment might be holding some potential art supplies. He's a field salesman for Honeywell who, in his spare time, makes sculptures from found objects silly robots with indicator-light eyes, circuitboard hearts and steamtrap heads; wind vanes made from old gauges, compressors and telephone bells.

That day at the auction, Jeff won the bidding. But then he and Thomas struck up a conversation and found they were looking for different pieces of the same junk. So they shared the lab equipment, and have been going in on bids together ever since.

"Tom is after linear motion and things that function that we can resell," Jeff says.

"He's looking for things he can build art with," Thomas says.

It works just fine. There is so much surplus, and so much potential within each item, that there's more than enough to share.

But their partnership comes with one firm rule: Jeff insists they keep things neat.

You have to control your materials, he says, or they will overwhelm you, leave you no room to create.

When taking surplus junk apart, Jeff separates the useful pieces into common groups and files them away in containers and boxes in his garage. Then, as he's making art, "it's like the pieces find each other."

Right now Jeff has a bunch of silver disks stacked neatly on his workbench. They are the remnants of a surplus hard-disk drive he has liberated from its plastic cage. To their creators, these disks had one purpose: store a bunch of ones and zeros, those two essential digits that make the code that computers speak. These disks speak no more, but in Jeff's hands they have an afterlife.

He plans to unstack them and spread them like cards, each slightly overlapping the other. He sees that they were once repositories for ones and zeros. But that was then. Now, he sees that they are alive, shimmering, asking to be transformed. He sees it coming: a big silver fish, flashing scales made of surplus.

Eli Sanders is a Seattle Times staff reporter. Benjamin Benschneider is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff photographer.