We used to dive this really cool dumpster in front of a wooden play equipment company. We got a lot of redwood and nuts and bolts, a ladder and other cool things too.
We built a play fort for our daughter mostly from the scraps we rescued from the dumpster.
They stopped throwing away good stuff like that, though.
Wouldn't mind coming across something like that myself. 
I weeded out most of my vacuums, always a good selection of those. Found a nice Oreck last year that just needed the cord repaired, haven't run across a Dyson yet though, still have hope.
We only had to buy some redwood 4x4 posts, some extra boards that were in direct contact with the ground, some nails, and a slide and we also bought some premade 3 foot by 3 foot cedar panels for the side walls of her fort. We used the ladder we found in the dumpster.
The fort is shaped like a hexagon, so it makes use of some of the shorter pieces of wood for the decking, and we originally planned to hang a tire swing from the middle, but it was not really strong enough, so we never did. My husband built us an octagonal picnic table out of the scraps of redwood left over from building the play fort.
