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Old 8th Mar 2021, 9:24 pm   #1
kevinaston1
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Default Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

Please could I ask for suggestions from our members?

My old boss has decided to sell up; repairs have dried up to zero (he has been trying to find an engineer for three years) so he wants to dispose of the workshop contents.

Before you jump in saying yes please, the workshop is around 4 X 20 metres, and it is packed to the rafters;

20,000 plus service manuals.

4 oscilloscopes, PM5518 pattern generator, PM5324 RF generator, Marconi 2955R, and all the usual general test equipment.


And, wait for it, when I left, there were nearly 70,000 spare parts, TV boards, semiconductors and passives from Philips JVC, Sharp and a million others.

Mountains of racking, storage bins and drawers.

Quantity of 1980’ CRT television/VCR combos.

I would think transport wise, a LWB transit would need more than 15 trips to shift it all.

Sited in West Yorkshire.

Any ideas who might purchase this, or how to dispose of it?
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Old 8th Mar 2021, 9:51 pm   #2
Lucien Nunes
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Default Re: Help please

Some parameters:

a) What does he want out of it? Maximum revenue / minimum hassle / see it made use of constructively?

b) How much time and effort does he want to put into shifting it? Sell individual items until it's gone / cherry pick some items and shift the rest as a job lot for peanuts / have someone cart everything away in one hit?

c) Does the stock contain a reasonable percentage of items that are obviously useful or in demand enough to make it worth anyone speculating on? Sorting and processing a ton of obscure parts for models that no-one wants to repair could significantly blunt the appeal of the useful bits.

d) Is it catalogued / easily accessible to catalogue at the moment?
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Old 8th Mar 2021, 10:20 pm   #3
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Default Re: Help please

I would consider listing the larger and more desireable items individualy on this site or an ebay.
Small parts and components, list as job lots, preferably still sorted in drawers or boxes.
"Approx 2,000 small resistors, various values, all sorted in the parts drawers as shown in pictures"
"Assorted VCR spares as shown in photos"
"assorted hand tools as shown"
Or similar listings for example. Small components sorted into drawers will fetch a much higher price than all jumbled together.

The only item that I personally would be interested in would be any "job lots" of pilot lamps, torch bulbs, Christmas light spares and similar miniature lamps.
Only if very cheap, consider offering elsewhere first.
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Old 8th Mar 2021, 11:31 pm   #4
Michael Maurice
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Default Re: Help please

Any spares for TV's that are more than 10 years old will not be wanted, lets face it very very few people want them repaired.

Some VCR spares would be useful especially for the more upmarket machines.

Oscilloscopes still have some value, the rest of the test equipment may have value depending on what it is.

As for the smaller components: TV semiconductors are virtually worthless as are LOPT's. Electrolytic capacitors may have dried out already depending on age.

If there is anything of real vintage, then it may be worth considering.

Another problem is storage which down in the South East is expensive.

As Lucien said, if you can catalogue it, you would get a better return.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 12:16 am   #5
knobtwiddler
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Default Re: Help please

Does he need to get out of the building soon, or is he able to spend several weeks selling the stuff?

What he'll get back, is directly proportionate to how much hassle he wants to put himself through. I think there is a surprising amount of interest in retro-tech amongst younger generations. I am optimistic that there is a person or persons out there who are willing to take it on as an ongoing concern. There is a guy in Czechslovakia who's tooled up to make new Nixie tubes. Who's to say that there isn't someone looking to corner the market in the UK for vintage TV tech? The question is, how much time and effort are you prepared (or have) to put into finding that person?
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 12:21 am   #6
knobtwiddler
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Default Re: Help please

>Mountains of racking, storage bins and drawers

There is a booming cottage industry in the UK in the form of making synthesiser and effects modules. I know a handful of people with these small businesses who will be very interested in the above items.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 4:46 pm   #7
Steve G4WCS
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Default Re: Help please

I'd be interested in the 2955.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 5:17 pm   #8
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

The service manuals might be of interest depending on price. Thats a lot of paperwork to find a home for, even if it's a temporary one before sorting and disposal of duplicates.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 5:49 pm   #9
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

When I closed my workshop in 2017, I had thousands of service manuals from A & Heath, Aiwa, B&O, Behringer, Decca, Grundig, Philips, Panasonic, Pioneer, Sanyo, Samsung etc etc etc. I advertised them ... no response. I advertised again free to collect ... the only response I got was from a manuals company expecting free delivery and no fees.
I sent them all for recycling.
Absolute shame as much of them contained service information only available to Authorised Service Centres, as I was.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 6:34 pm   #10
David Simpson
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

Right enough, Kevin, you & your old boss have got a mammoth task. Depending on how soon the "Lockdown" restrictions are lifted, you might consider taking the test equipment & decent usable components to BVWS Swapmeets & similar venues. Golborne isn't that far away - nr Warrington, then the others further south are probably a 3hour motorway drive away. Also there is Retrotech sales/auctions.
Sadly, I suspect the modernish flat screen telly stuff hasn't much value, but older CRT telly stuff might be of interest to vintage TV buffs.
Most certainly, a decent catalogue & plenty of pictures would be welcome on this Forum's "For sale" sub-section, no doubt.

Regards, David
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 7:04 pm   #11
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

See if an auction house will take it on, if not then that tells you something.

Last year, I think, I cleared all my collected good bits from 20+ years of buying, it was all given away, no one wanted to pay anything for it.

Do not underestimate the enormous work needed to catalogue and sell this stuff on ebay, I now wouldn't do it. Taking to a Swapmeet etc, by the time you have rented a van, loaded it, unloaded it, loaded the 99% that didn't sell back, unloaded it then temper will be short.

To be serious I would take a sample of the stuff to your local scrappy, explain the situation and try to get irony aluminium rates, about £0.15 kg, and send it all to them. If someone else agreed to pay the same amount to clear the building then I would grab it with both hands. If there are 15 van loads, 15 tonnes, then you won't get much better prices whatever you do.

These are audio video service manuals? Even the pile of Tektronix and HP and similar I had ended up being given away.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 7:27 pm   #12
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

It would be nice of the technical information was made widely available via the services of a scanner/pdf conversion. I realise the mountain of effort involved in such a task but this kind of stuff can never be replaced - components can always be swapped out though.

I have no idea who would take on such a task (I'd love to myself but other commitments prevent this) but the thought of the loss of all that information makes me cringe.... almost like book burning...... (assuming this is how they end up).
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 7:43 pm   #13
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

If you're thinking of cataloging/photographing/selling bits on Ebay - look at the time it will take you to do this [including time taken packing individual items then taking them to the Post-office/Hermes ParcelShop] - and ask yourself - will someone guarantee to pay you the minimum-wage for this work?

[if the selloff is stuff-from-a-business, it also needs to be charging VAT on the sales, too]

If rent/business-rates are still being charged on the workshop this could be hundreds of pounds per month; doing all you can to curtail this cash-outflow would be uppermost in my mind.

Pragmatically, i think the most cost-effective path will be to identify the 5% of 'stuff' that might be worth reselling, and getting a WEEE skip for the rest.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 8:19 pm   #14
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kellys_eye View Post
It would be nice of the technical information was made widely available via the services of a scanner/pdf conversion. I realise the mountain of effort involved in such a task but this kind of stuff can never be replaced - components can always be swapped out though.
Sure - but rememeber to make this information "widely available" you'd either need to spend time negotiating with the individual companies who own the copyright to get them to release it, or go-it-alone and risk time in court facing the likes of Sony's global copyright/patent lawsharks.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 8:29 pm   #15
wireman
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

I remember watching a video on youtube relating to someone closing down a large lab, they had hired someone to catalogue everything and sell it. But this was at a scale where it made sense and I don't think it was in the UK.
Perhaps you can pay someone keen to take on the job at some point.

[Edit-] I think this may have been the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8nbHYOc8ns

Last edited by wireman; 9th Mar 2021 at 8:42 pm.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 10:12 pm   #16
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

You may be able to dispose of the lot via a big house clearance company. You won't get a great price, but the company will have storage facilities so can sell over several months, and will have multiple sales channels, everything from upmarket auctions to the local flea market or car boot.

Unfortunately, the difficulty of disposing of this sort of stuff explains why so much of it ends up in a skip on the way to a WEEE contractor. Universities and colleges are notorious for disposing of lots of perfectly good stuff like this after upgrades. Even giving stuff away is too much bureaucratic hassle.
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 10:25 pm   #17
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

I off the Guys in a TV etc repair group i am in closed his shop down as retiring he offered it free to the group if they came and collected large bits or was happy to box smaller stuff if we paid postage , so i said i was now only doing vintage radios record players etc , so i asked , caps germanium valves etc and got 2 large boxes full , 1 of the other guys aboard was still doing crt tv's and videos so had all those bits , i believe the rest sadly was scraped. good luck clearing a scary task
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Old 9th Mar 2021, 11:50 pm   #18
kevinaston1
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

Wonderful ideas people. Many thanks, I will pass all of these onto him, and let him decide what to do.

As a closing note on this, the following is a quick precis of how his stock came about. It should bring a few smiles (and some tears of horror).

A few years back, the company boss purchased the contents of a service company workshop. When I went up to see the contents, I was more than pleased; over 20,000 service manuals, hundreds of thousands of components and replacement boards of all descriptions.

Of the service manuals. When I looked at them, they were meticulously Dewey Decimal catalogued. Did they come to our workshop? No, he rented a room half a mile away, and had two men with a van stack them in the room. The thousands of hours spent cataloguing the manuals went out of the window as they were simply stacked into piles wherever they found a space.

Ever tried to find a service manual, which may or may not be there, in a mountain of 20,000? I did, on numerous occasions, rarely successful.

Eventually, he saw sense and they were transported to the workshop. It took me many weeks of hard work to restore the cataloguing, using hundreds of magazine rack file boxes and to list them on excel.

Spare parts? These were brought to our workshop by the same men with a van, who were tasked with the job of picking up all the racks and boxes, and transporting them to us – with no supervision. I was puzzled as to why the Racco cabinets contained hundreds of each of larger components, but only a very few SMT semiconductors.

I questioned one of the van lads. How did you carry the cabinets, did anything get dropped out of them?

Don’t know, we carried them on their back, I did notice toward the end of the day; there were many thousands of bits of black plastic on the floor!

Included in the parts were a great many replacement LCD and plasma screens, including ten 60” plasmas. Each sealed box was clearly marked, DO NOT STACK, STAND THIS WAY UP etc.

Said van lads obviously could not read, the whole lot were stacked flat, and then a few hundredweight of dismantled racking bays were stood on top of them. None survived.

So, to catalogue the spare parts, he would task me with this surely?

Nope, four youngsters off the street were employed for four weeks to make a list of all the parts. Well, anyone can tell what an electronic component or replacement television board is can’t they?

I looked at the list of after four weeks. A lot of the television main boards somehow had the same part number. The youngsters had no idea of how television boards are identified, and so they wrote down the first number that their eyes were drawn to; the tuner socket part number.

Semiconductors, passive components. These were lumped into big boxes and vaguely described; “e.g. round thing with wire at each end”.

When the boss finally saw sense, and allowed me to catalogue and index things, it took many weeks of careful work to undo the carnage that had been caused.

In the words of an old MOD technician who once worked for me. “The seven cardinal P’s: Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents @iss Poor Performance”

Were the components and service manuals not on a computer database you may ask? Quite probably yes, there was a massive mainframe server, even had its own satellite microwave TX/RX high speed internet link.

Was it not any use? No idea; never got to see it or switch it on. Said boss got a local “computer technician” to look at it. Since the technology was way beyond anything he had ever had experience of, he deemed it to be scrap, and it was sold as such; I only saw some photographs.

To allow you to gain some better understanding of this boss’s mentality.

He had been told that on the mainframe coming into his possession, it included that company’s customer database of around 2 million customers. I will write to all of them, he proudly stated. I looked at him and asked who would pay for that? What do you mean he asked?

2 million sheets of paper, same number of envelopes, a few thousand ink cartridges, half a dozen heavy duty printers, not forgetting 2 million 38p stamps, that will be well over a million quid for that one mail shot.

He purchased a “new” second hand van; the back outfitted with lashing bars.

Two of the bars had been ripped off the wall and bent, so he asked me to straighten them. Each bar was secured to the wall with hundreds of self tapping screws, and so I set to work removing them; not a quick job for a 64 year old with arthritis.

He came back after a few hours to see the progress. I explained it would be much faster with a powered screwdriver. Ah, I have one in my office upstairs. Well, what good is it doing up there instead of in the workshop?

Well; I didn’t want it to get used!!!!!!
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Old 10th Mar 2021, 9:02 am   #19
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

I'd be interested in the PM5324 RF generator if he wants shot of it.
As others have already said, it really depends how much effort he is willing to put in or, come to that, what exactly he wants out of it?
Sorry if that's not much help.
Occasionally here at work we have to dispose of surplus stock, we normally sell it to a suitable dealer & never make back what it originally cost, we're lucky to get 50%.
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Old 10th Mar 2021, 5:03 pm   #20
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Default Re: Help please. Disposal of workshop contents.

Quote:
Originally Posted by kevinaston1 View Post
Wonderful ideas people. Many thanks, I will pass all of these onto him, and let him decide what to do.

As a closing note on this, the following is a quick precis of how his stock came about. It should bring a few smiles (and some tears of horror).
And I thought all this type of character/boss was confined to the industry in which I have spent most of my working life!

I admire your tenacity and concern for the stuff. I think I’d be inclined to walk away and leave him to engage two lads and a van.
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