Who cuts all the cables when removing test equipment????.........

[Smokey]

I see this all the time on ebay.  Working equipment that was "removed from service" by just hacking all the connected cables with some wire cutters.



Cut power cords... Cut GPIB.. Cut Coax...

WTF?  Who does this?  I mean even the guys tasked with liquidating a bankrupt company's assets must have some idea that those assets still have some value. 

And a further WTF... why leave those hacked up cables connected to the equipment when you list it on ebay???

[coromonadalix]

well humans  loll   some simply don't care, they cut and pile them on shelves or skid ....

[DaJMasta]

For some companies getting rid of equipment, they have a requirement for the equipment not to be operational, and sometimes cutting all the cables suffices for the requirement (sometimes it's smashing the screen, instead.)  And there are some surplusing operations that is just trying to do volume and is not trying to resell with testing/research/knowledge of what it's worth, so they're basically trying to get as many pallets of the stuff out the door in a day as possible, and this means that cords that don't pull out get snipped.

In your case, imagine a salvage company gets called in to remove a rack of equipment.  They can't ship the whole racks, so they remove it from the front and snip anything in back, then sell for parts as an auction.  Requires no knowledge of the equipment or condition and maximizes the amount of items they can list in a day.

Rough, sometimes careless work, but there are business models where it can make sense.

[coppice]

The kind of people who clear out places that go into receivership aren't exactly the smartest, and seldom have any tools not designed for cutting. They enter a lab, with all the equipment sitting on benches, wired for the tests taking place at the time the bailiffs shut the place down. They might have figured out the bayonet fit of the BNC connectors, but there is no way they would have undone the retaining screws on the IEEE488 connector. A lot of these clear outs turn some valuable equipment into worthless trash. This equipment has largely survived.

[jjoonathan]

My favorite are the chips shamelessly chunked out of their boards. These listings are one crusty street cart and a few neon lights short of a crazy cyberpunk novel. Truly, we live in the future!

[ebastler]

My favorite are the chips shamelessly chunked out of their boards. These listings are one crusty street cart and a few neon lights short of a crazy cyberpunk novel. Truly, we live in the future!

Well, if those chips have any future at all, I probably prefer them to be cut out of a PCB, rather than being hastily unsoldered with an 800 °C heat gun...

[Demon Xanth]

It's being removed by non-technical people on a short timeline. They aren't going to sell the cables since to them it has less value than the cost of listing them. It's screwed in, so the fastest way is to just give it a snip and move on.

It's similar to when a junkyard pulls a motor from a car. They don't spend a whole lot of time undoing hoses and cables. They just grab a battery sawzall and get the motor out of the car in ten minutes and move onto the next.

[jjoonathan]

My favorite are the chips shamelessly chunked out of their boards. These listings are one crusty street cart and a few neon lights short of a crazy cyberpunk novel. Truly, we live in the future!

Well, if those chips have any future at all, I probably prefer them to be cut out of a PCB, rather than being hastily unsoldered with an 800 °C heat gun...

Yep, 100%. Everyone is being rational here, but optimization can lead to crazy places lol

[jpanhalt]

1) They may be that way to show they were removed from service.
2) It's likely that doing that saves the step of adding protective covers, since the cables/connectors are not worth the time to prepare for resale, unless something very special.  So, leaving the cable and its plug is added value and protective.
3) As for engines and such, again, cables are generally considered worthless.  Leaving cables attached may be a help for like kind engine swaps.  Some examples: I swapped the engine in my wife's Pontiac 6000 station wagon with an Olds engine.  Everything except the throttle linkage matched up well.  I needed an EVAC canister solenoid plug for a Fusion and would have been delighted to find one that had been cut and left attached to the solenoid.  When I found a junked Ford that had about 12" of the cable intack, I wa ecstatic.  The aftermarket price for the pigtail was about $60.  My cost was $5 (including tax  ), which was probably the minimum price that recycling yard got for anything.

[richnormand]

Rough, sometimes careless work, but there are business models where it can make sense.

Unfortunate but true. A good sign of a society where money is more important than being environmentally efficient.
I am sure our children will remember.
Read my signature for context.
cheers.

[Fungus]

WTF?  Who does this?

Companies who are writing it off for tax purposes.

It happens a lot.

[Bud]

You guys should Thank them it was not bulldosered.

[jpanhalt]

Unfortunate but true. A good sign of a society where money is more important than being environmentally efficient.

  Has there ever been a society on Earth that didn't do that?  They may not have traded in money as we view it today.  Many people romanticise the American Indian.  They were in fact anything but that way. 

[edpalmer42]

Two other disabled/destroyed tricks I've seen are removing the fuse and fuse cap or removing the top and bottom covers.

The fuse thing makes me chuckle.  The missing covers makes me growl.

Ed

[coppice]

It gets really sad when they cut some cables which turn out to be very expensive active probes.

[Smokey]

It gets really sad when they cut some cables which turn out to be very expensive active probes.

Pretty sure those are triax in the OP picture

[coppercone2]

200lb gorilla


it would have to have the right form factor that is currently chic to get any sort of respect 

I think technical people are delusional to think that others spent as much time on education as they did lol


Think about what sequence of events would put you in their position. More then likely you would be placed in some manager or communication position in their organization.... the phrase you will hear is 'this guy thinks too much to work in 'team' (crew) '

[Cyclotron]

Copper is removed and sold for scrap from operational substations. I'm not surprised that cables are cut to separate the copper from the gear.  Sell gear, sell copper.
If care was taken, you'd pay more.

[nctnico]

It gets really sad when they cut some cables which turn out to be very expensive active probes.

Pretty sure those are triax in the OP picture

Then again, 99% of problems with electrical systems are cabling related. Better use known-good cables rather than some random cables from Ebay. Some people obsess over getting generic probes with scopes. When I buy an oscilloscope, the probes that come with it go into the bin unless they are really special or brand new, good quality probes.

[pdenisowski]

It's not just non-technical people who do this.  For some cable television technicians, they do service de-installations by simply cutting the coax near the tap instead of unscrewing the F-connector.  But because the remaining "pigtail" is still plugged into the tap, the center conductor often acts as a small antenna and can create serious egress issues (i.e. cable television signals propagating over the air and interfering with licensed spectrum holders like cellular network operators).

Ask me how I know

[tszaboo]

Depending on what the other end of the cable is. Could be that it's in a cable channel going through the building 50m away.
And it's not economical, or dont have the tools to remove the cable.
I know, why not just unscrew it...

[coppice]

It's not just non-technical people who do this.  For some cable television technicians, they do service de-installations by simply cutting the coax near the tap instead of unscrewing the F-connector.

I understand that. Those F connectors are a PITA, with corrosion causing the thread to jam. Why bother with the risk of a problem occurring, when you can get away with a simple snip?

[pdenisowski]

Why bother with the risk of a problem occurring, when you can get away with a simple snip?

Because it can easily create an egress issue, where cable TV signals interfere with cellular bands. The amount of time and effort spent correcting this issue is easily orders of magnitude greater than what is needed to properly remove the drop.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours in the field tracking down these issues with both cable TV and cellular network engineers. And believe me when I say that none of them thought that cutting the cable was an acceptable disconnection method.

[coppercone2]

they probobly paid the janitor 50$ to decommission it

actually no, janitors are smart, it would get unscrewed. its a mystery.

hire some kids off the street? or maybe the bosses friends after he brought them a 24 pack? It can happen in a medium small company. A big one has too much protocol to let it happen but anything with under like 50 employee its almost likely to happen. Its like a hot shot management move to get random ass people to do things and brag about paying pennies on the dollar.


I think there is a 95% probability the person who organized that work detail probobly has a networth of over 1M dollars.

[Hydron]

If you look at it another way, that's about $50 worth of triax connectors if you can reuse them...

Still hate seeing things damaged or destroyed for tax purposes