Sunday, 10 December 2006
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Surplus
posted at
12:34 PM
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My friend Dennis and I made an expedition down there yesterday. Dennis is an inveterate shopper for tools, a man who pleads the Fifth when asked "Do you just spend all day cruising the listings on craigslist?" Me, I just like sorting through junk looking for interesting stuff. A guy outing down to Kent sounded like just the thing for a Saturday morning.
Well, almost just the thing. We agreed to meet at a nearby super-giganto-mall. Whoa. Before 10 in the morning two weeks before Christmas, the mall parking lot was completely full. But we eventually found a place to stash one car, and headed south.
When we got there, Dennis said "The way I like to do this is to just go up and down all the aisles." That worked for me, so that's what we did, peering into bins and poking at stuff that looked cool.[1]
After some time of this, Dennis noted that looking at all this stuff gives you some sense of what-all goes into building airplanes. No lie. It also gives you a sense of the huge world of manufacturing, where suppliers all over the world produce thousands of special parts and tools just for Boeing, a whole economy of fabrication and commerce that we civilians have no clue about.
We also poked through the computers, but this was less exciting than I'd hoped. Not surprisingly, the computers that Boeing has surplused are old. They take out the hard disks, wipe those, and sell them separately. I was hefting one of these, a 20GB drive for $20, but we agreed after a few moments of consideration that this was above the current market price for storage, so no go. One thing we liked, although we didn't want to buy, were the laptops (also stripped) that looked like they'd been built to mil spec. Not exactly yer Sony Vaio.
We ended up in the tool corral. This was a reminder that at its heart, Boeing is probably, like, the world's biggest machine shop. There were dies and grinders, and a huge bin of used air tools ($35 ea, 3 for $75). There were wrenches for 2" and 3" nuts, and a torque wrench that started at 200 foot-pounds and according to the dial, topped out at 1600. Try using that for your spark plugs, was Dennis's comment. Everything was either big or it was tiny (drill bits, etc.). I mused about whether these things were beyond their useful life, but Dennis guessed that at Boeing, a lot of stuff probably needs to be within very tight tolerances. Various bits might no longer be good for making 747s, but are probably still ok for making, dunno, sheds in the backyard.
There is a certain kind of atmosphere at this place, of course. You can count the number of women walking around on one hand (or more like, two fingers). One guy had his two small children with him, explaining to them what he was looking at. Such is the stuff of fond childhood memories, I was thinking. In the tool corral, they had a sign that amused me:Cutting tools are sharp!
That's why they're called "cutting tools."
Handle with caution. Dennis has recently taken up welding, so he was looking for things he could use as jigs. I didn't have any goal, but came out with a bag of small stuff, including a couple of old-fashioned and ever-more-elusive straight keyboards ($1 each) and a hard hat for working in the low-ceilinged crawlspace (or that was my excuse to myself).
Dennis said that these days, stuff is sold on eBay by Boeing and by employees who get first crack at this stuff. Although Boeing Surplus might be in Kent, they have a world-wide market for their better stuff, like the 1-ton bandsaws or or pallet-sized lots of usable matériel or what have you.
We noted also that prices were for the most part not fabulously good, not just on computer stuff, but on most stuff. We speculated that the explosion of online sales has had a kind of classic market effect whereby the price is set not by a guy who gives each item a couple seconds' thought, but by the, you know, wisdom of the online-shopping crowd. Good for Boeing, not so good for those of us looking for real bargains.
Since we were in the neighborhood, we made a side trip to Harbor Freight Tools. Interesting place. They sell tools of all sorts, pretty cheap, that seem to be mostly made in China. You gets what you pays for, as they say, but there is great allure in stuff like a drill press on sale for $40.
We topped off our guy outing with tacos and then Starbucks. Definitely a successful outing. When Sarah got home in the evening, she asked "Did you have a good day?". Boy, did I ever.
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