Sandusky surplus wire and cable buying desk

The winter shutdown window

A shutdown compresses work. Cable is pulled out of a substation, a conveyor or a press line in a fortnight, coiled on the floor, and the crew moves to the next building. By the end of the window there are reels everywhere and nobody left who knows which run each one came from.

That timing is why the manifest matters more than the reel count. If the plant can say which line each coil came off, the same material can be valued as reusable. If it cannot, the lot is valued on copper and aluminum content, and the plant will feel the difference in the number.

Port cable, coal dock and salt air

The harbour berths and the coal dock run unloaders, conveyors and cranes, and their cable lives outdoors in salt air. Ultraviolet light and chloride attack the jacket from the outside in while the conductor underneath stays perfect, which is why port cable often looks worse than it is.

What fails first is the outer sheath on festoon and reeling cable, and the point where the cable enters a pendant control. Ask for the cable that was replaced at the last inspection rather than the cable still in service, and seal the ends of anything cut out of a live circuit the same day it comes down.

Automotive supplier lots

The supplier plants here run the same equipment as the ones in Toledo and Fremont, only smaller. Robot cells, resistance welders, press lines, paint support. Cable comes out at cell changeover and at die change, in short lengths, often already stripped at one end.

Short lengths are not a problem in themselves. A hundred twenty-foot drops of the same welding cable gauge and jacket make a saleable lot; twenty drops in six different gauges do not. Sorting is the work, and it is usually work the plant can do before the trailer arrives rather than after.

Paper, packaging and what the crib holds

Packaging work is continuous, so its cable comes out in small events: a drive replaced, a thermocouple run rerouted, a control cabinet rebuilt. Those lots are boxed rather than reeled, and they are easy to lose track of in a maintenance crib.

Open the boxes before valuing them. A crib box filled for ten years holds cut ends, part reels of control cable, and offcuts of tray cable too short to re-sell but too clean to throw away. That is a scrap-copper lot with a few sellable pieces inside it, and it should be described that way.

• Part reels of control cable, one colour only
• Tray cable offcuts under ten feet
• Drive cable with the shield drain cut short
• Thermocouple extension on cardboard spools
• Loose building wire, no carton, no tag