Job-trailer leftovers, cut-offs and mixed lots

What the trailer actually holds

A working trailer holds the residue of a dozen jobs. Coils of THHN in the sizes that get used on every service. Part reels of MC and tray cable from a run that finished short. Cord and welding lead from equipment repairs. Boxes of data cable opened for one office fit-out. Copper grounding conductor offcuts in a bucket.

None of it is valuable in isolation and all of it is usable in aggregate. The problem is that it has been loaded in the order the jobs finished, so the oldest material is at the back and has been sitting under everything else for years. Emptying the trailer is the first step, and it is always slower than expected.

Cut-offs are not waste

A cut-off is the length left when a pull is finished. In the trade it is the piece that goes back on the shelf for the next small job, and a contractor with a well-kept shelf buys less wire than one without. A coil of twenty feet of 12 gauge is worth keeping; forty of them in a tangle are worth sorting.

The lengths that matter are the ones just short of a common pull. A piece too short for the job it came from is often long enough for a repair, a temporary feed or a piece of equipment work. Sorting by length into rough bands, then by size, turns a pile into something a buyer can look at.

Sorting before anybody reviews it

Three passes do most of the work. First by construction: building wire, armored cable, tray, cord, data, bare copper. Second by size within each construction, because a coil of 12 gauge and a coil of 4/0 are not the same commodity. Third by condition, pulling out anything kinked, burnt, painted or too short to use.

Keep the tags. A coil with the original band and print is identified; the same coil loose in a crate is a guess. Where the band is gone, a strip of tape with the gauge and the construction written on it does nearly as well, and it costs a minute.

• Construction separated first, gauge second
• Bands and tags kept on every coil
• Burnt, painted and kinked wire pulled out
• Bare copper kept in its own container
• Data cable kept dry and off the trailer floor

Where the trailers are in Ohio

Contractor leftovers cluster where service work clusters. Springfield and the Miami Valley have a steady supply from the machine shops, food plants and older industrial buildings that get rewired a section at a time, and the contractors working those buildings keep trailers parked at a shop on the edge of town.

The larger commercial contractors working the I-70 corridor produce tidier material, because a big job has a purchasing process and a site container rather than a trailer. Their leftovers are usually part reels of one or two constructions, which is a much easier review than a trailer full of coils, and the two should not be described in the same way.