I made it over to the St. Louis Park Ax-Man this weekend. I was in geeked out overload. Tons of great stuff.

I'm converting my milling machine to CNC. I was able to pick up a nice enclosure for the controller, wiring, and switches for about 10% of what it would have cost me at a store for normal people.

So not really near plymouth, but I heard about this place which has all things chemistry and a lot of biology:

BME Labstore in Little Canada
http://www.labandscience.com/home.php

ABC electronics (the walk-in store for Industrial Surplus Inc.) in downtown Minneapolis, MN. They have all kinds of stuff.

Another valuable store is at 55 and highway 100- AEI Electronics and Parts.

They sell pretty high-quality stuff- soldering irons, tools, protoboards, and some actual components at excessive prices (I bought some 2N2222 transistors there for about $.40 a piece- probably would've been a quarter of that at Digikey).

That reminds me, Digikey is located in Thief River Falls, so basically anything you buy from them, shipped ground, will be here the next day. That's a REALLY nice thing to have.

ambles machine, in the seward neighborhood.
its on the weird end of cedar ave (by the cedar box company).
sure, they sell stock steel, aluminum, diamondplate, etc..
but they also sell trophy heads, random and refurbished milling bits, remnants of lift cranes, all sorts of random widgets.
not as crazy (or popular) as the ax-mans, but worth a look.
oh, and they have a gigantic brake press that is just fun to watch too.
they do simple sheetform work if you are so inclined.

partstock computers (http://www.partstockpc.com/) SOMETIMES has some good deals.

everywhere else i know, people have mentioned.

Amateur & Antique Radio Consignment Center
632 N Prior Ave, St Paul

It's the little white house-looking building sitting between all the warehouses; the door is around on the side. Inside is a small space stuffed to the rafters with various bits of antique and not-so-antique electronic goods. Transmitters, receivers, antennas, speakers, oscilloscopes, signal generators, frequency counters, variacs, bench meters, big meters, small meters, knobs, switches, hand mics, vacuum tubes, unidentifiable shiny objects -- heaven. A near-legendary place for the local ham radio crowd.

It's only open a few hours a week: 4-8PM Tuesday and Thursday, 8AM-12PM Saturday. Prices are totally reasonable, and the owner is friendly and full of knowledge.

The U of M also has a reuse center that they try to send all of their old but serviceable odds 'n' ends to. I haven't poked around there much (although I used to deliver stuff there). I know that it's mostly furniture but they do have things like old bikes, clocks, typewriters, and god knows what else. They're located just south of the intersection of 29th and Como, just a few blocks west of Como and 280.

The U of M's surplus site was a profound disappointment to me after visiting the one at Iowa State University.

The ISU shop is open rarely- Wednesday 12-3pm. But it's worth it, if you manage to get there.

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~centrals/isusurplus.htm

This is turning into a good list, it should make it onto the wiki once it gets stabilized.

I've got quite a savvy system for cataloging sources on the wiki once some kinks get worked out.