Trash or treasure? The tale of two lathes

If you need proof the world is upside down..

Did you go dumpster diving?

my buddy sent that today, it's 100 miles west of here. probably a good thing it's that far, or I'd be in the dumpster with it right now..! they somehow dropped it 20 feet and cracked the castings in multiple locations.

What the op posted is almost symbolic as to how the west has gone upside down in values and common sense in a Adams family mixed values sort of way

cyanidekid said:

my buddy sent that today, it's 100 miles west of here. probably a good thing it's that far, or I'd be in the dumpster with it right now..! they somehow dropped it 20 feet and cracked the castings in multiple locations.

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100 miles west of New York, so somewhere in Erie, PA then.

I used to do work for a medium sized company who'd seen better days They 'd lots of machines but had gradually down sized on operators. The MD wasn't dealing with a full deck. One day he told me - " Any of these machines need repairing and it's going to cost me more than £250 get the machine outside on the car park ".

As a result I saw a few machines like that end up in the skip ( dumpster ).

Regards Tyrone.

pressbrake1 said:

What the op posted is almost symbolic as to how the west has gone upside down in values and common sense in a Adams family mixed values sort of way

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Yea we're all messed up over here. You see one guy trash a lathe for unknown purposes and we are all upside down. Thanks. Thanks alot.

Tyrone Shoelaces said:

I used to do work for a medium sized company who'd seen better days They 'd lots of machines but had gradually down sized on operators. The MD wasn't dealing with a full deck. One day he told me - " Any of these machines need repairing and it's going to cost me more than £250 get the machine outside on the car park ".

As a result I saw a few machines like that end up in the skip ( dumpster ).

Regards Tyrone.

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Talking of idiot directors..
Twenty years ago my father retired and sold out to his partner.
When he retired his son took over as MD, well one month cash flow was short so mr wet behind the ears md decided to cut up the pressbrake and weigh it in, the men just complying to orders.

The moron thought the 300 ton pressbrake weighed 300ton not 20! He thought he was in for £60k scrap!!!! ...I think he covered gas wages and fuel

dkmc said:

100 miles west of New York, so somewhere in Erie, PA then.

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Scranton area, Erie is more like 435.

does anyone have a make on the unit in the dumpster?

A fellow engineer told me a sad tale about machine tool destruction as well. He worked in a firm that made some kind of specialized machinery for rolling and coating some sort of wire. The firm had a prototype shop or toolroom, which had been equipped with LeBlond and Southbend lathes, toolroom lathes like Hardinges and Monarch 10 EE's, Bridgeports, Brown and Sharpe mills, precision grinders, and the usual contents of a toolroom shop. The firm was re-configuring and getting out of the building of the wire rolling and coating machinery. The result was the managers decreed that anything associated with that portion of the business was to be destroyed lest competitors learn proprietary stuff from it. The next thing my friend knew, the scrappers were loose in the toolroom, and they were taking out the fine machine tools and smashing them or cutting them with an air arc before putting them into the dumpsters. My friend and other people in the know about the machine tools asked if they could purchase some of them for home shops. Management said absolutely not, giving the fact that these machine tools had been part of their "trade secrets". My friend said it made him want to cry.

I have also heard of plants where, rather than sell good used machine tools, scrapping beyond any re-use is standard policy. The reasons for this are twofold:
-the machine tools are fully depreciated and to scrap them means a writeoff on the taxes
-the fear of being sued by anyone removing the machine tools from the premises or being hurt by using them outweighs any thoughts of selling for re-use.

Front office types think in terms of OSHA, lawsuit avoidance, and similar. If a machine tool is "old" it therefore is automatically "unsafe" to the thinking of the front office suits. These types cannot imagine that a person would be able to work on anything "old" without all manner of the latest "idiot proofing". Of course, these same types are neither engineers nor machinists, never changed a car tire or hung a picture on a wall, so are fit to make the determination as to what makes machine tools "safe".

Years before, in the early 70's, there was a junkyard on Howard Street in New London, Connecticut called Calamari Brothers. I am not kidding- Calamari means "squid" in Italian, and these guys were squid-like in how they pulled everything and anything into their junkyards. In those days, you could roam the yard, pick out what you wanted and they'd throw it on the scales. One Saturday morning, I came into Calamari's yard to see what the week's haul had been. An old machine shop had been cleaned out. There was a huge Fitchburg lathe, a few Flather lathes (one even had a quick change gearbox), some Putnam lathes, a Whitcomb Blaisdell planer, a few camelback drills, and a bunch of WWII era machine tools like gang drills, turret lathes, precision grinders and more. I lived in a small apartment and was constantly moving from one jobsite to the next, so could only pick things over for tooling. The fellows in the yard had set the machine tools they thought might be re-usable or saleable aside (like the Flather lathe with the quick change gearbox). The rest, like the big Fitchburg lathe and the planer were busted up for scrap. This was done by using a crane with an electromagnet on it. Heavy stuff was picked up by the magnet like chunks of old diesel engines and similar, raised to a height and then the power to the magnet was turned off. The stuff held by the magnet dropped onto the machine tools. Once the machine tools started to bust apart into chunks, those chunks were picked up and dropped on whatever bigger portions remained.

I got the cast bronze nameplates off the old Fitchburg lathe and Whitcomb Blaisdell planer. The Fitchburg lathe was patented in the 1860's.
The timing of that destruction was all wrong. Old machine tool collectors such as ourselves were not in any abundance. Calamari brothers and their yard crew was hoping someone would come thru the gate and buy the old machine tools, but it did not happen. I got a lot of smaller stuff from their yard including a good blacksmith's leg vise for just its weight. Progress does happen, but throwing what appeared to have been a good later model engine lathe into a dumpster is wrong.

another fine example of waste. There was a company in Detroit, Schaube Equipment I think, where we used to buy parts for our Excello thread grinders. The had alot of stuff. Went bankrupt and the city went in and thru everything in a dumpster.

A few years ago, we made a trip to our usual machine dealer. He had three or four chinese metal lathes, still strapped to pallets that were junk.............never could really get an answer to what was wrong with them, just that they were scrap.................Made me wonder just how much "good" iron went into making these defective machines, not to mention dragging the iron halfway around the world just to make defective junk, then haul it back halfway around the world...................just to junk it again?

Then there are the idiots in the educational field. Might have told this one before. I obtained several machines from auctions that the Buffalo School System had. From what the guys in the warehouse told me they got a new superintendent who decreed that all shop classes were to end. Now among other items I got a Cincinnati lathe and mill. When I inquired as to was there any tooling left, the answer was that those in charge decreed that all the tooling had to go into dumpsters - firing offense if anything was taken. So the idiots in charge sold the bare machines and scrapped cabinets full of tooling. But then about par for a lot of government employees in this state - excepting of course those who inhabit this forum and fought the upper level idiots (thinking of Joe and myself - in one life - for starters).

Dale

So apparently the way to get first pick of good used machines is to start a scrap metal company. I'm on it!

Chip

rj1939 said:

A few years ago, we made a trip to our usual machine dealer. He had three or four chinese metal lathes, still strapped to pallets that were junk.............never could really get an answer to what was wrong with them, just that they were scrap.................Made me wonder just how much "good" iron went into making these defective machines, not to mention dragging the iron halfway around the world just to make defective junk, then haul it back halfway around the world...................just to junk it again?

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Perfect communist business plan operated by China

We de industrialised and shut plants down out sourcing manufacturing
To china.
Due to de industrialisation we no longer require same amounts of machinery so machinery manufacturing goesdown the pan loosing critical skills within a generation

China pays good money for scrap metals so people loose sensibility and mindlessly scrap machinery thus de industrialisation occurs

Despite environmental issues that make running a business in the west expensive we ship junk to and throw to china as none of their junk is long lived , utter madness!

Chip Chester said:

So apparently the way to get first pick of good used machines is to start a scrap metal company. I'm on it!

Chip

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While it may be somewhat humorous, you might be surprised at what would come in...................when scrap was in the neighborhood of 200-250 a ton, a lot of machines bit the dust..........people went absolutely stupid, a friend of mine had to guard his stuff to keep it from getting cut up and carted away.........by his own family members.
I told my son, that if we had room, we would go in the scrap business. If nothing else, it gets you some exposure to what is out there. Offer a bit over going rate, you would get the pick of what is there.

pressbrake1 said:

What the op posted is almost symbolic as to how the west has gone upside down in values and common sense in a Adams family mixed values sort of way

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Cannot agree more, Yes the Adams family buisiness ethic's definately minus the humour , But with frequently a lake full of tears added in for good measure, When the decline of heavy , traditional, and good engineering began in my kneck of the woods, I came across one engineering plant which I visited, and the scrppers were demolishing the machinery virtually as the last workpiece was lifted off the worktable, and then the workman was dispensed with .
In that scenario, was a big planing machine, and its destruction began even before its operator was finished saying his good byes, He had operated the said machine for a good fifty years, The tears were blinding the poor old soul, I guess a substantial portion of his heart was broken with his beloved old machine, Would he survive long at his advanced age? I doubt it
I wonder if the "Wolves of Wall Street, and The Robert Maxwells ever gave a moments thought to the social consequences of their ruthless pursuit of wealth , Broken lives frequently with the trail of broken factories and social cohesion,
Thus was also the lot of three old moulders I worked beside With the loss of their job, went the loss of their reason to live,

guess i can sum it up with broken iron and a western culture which has lost its way.

cyanidekid said:

Scranton area, Erie is more like 435.

does anyone have a make on the unit in the dumpster?

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Nope my guess is wrong....

I worked at a large corporation that suddenly closed a major unit. The place was emptied into dumpsters. Complete stockrooms full of unused parts were dropped on top of fully equipped, top end Nikon microscopes. GCs, spectrophotometers, custom instrumentation. Motors that still had the factory packaging. Boxes and boxes of new bearings.

We took a quick wander through the office area. It was like one of those end of the world movies. People had work up on the monitor, stopped in the middle of a paragraph. Dust free spots where personal memorabilia had been taken.

I shudder when I think of the destruction caused by the accountants. All the stuff was written off, so it couldn't be sold. A supposed offset against profits at the rest of the company, which went bankrupt less then 10 years later.

cutting oil Mac said:

I wonder if the "Wolves of Wall Street, and The Robert Maxwells ever gave a moments thought to the social consequences of their ruthless pursuit of wealth , Broken lives frequently with the trail of broken factories and social cohesion,

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It helps(?) to remember that a lot of the top financial players are sociopaths, and haven't a care for what those beneath them suffer. That's probably not the top reason for destruction of working class jobs, but it plays a role.