On 9 May 2016 at 7:50, Grimmund wrote:

> Happened to us at work.  Someone went through and cleared out a bunch
> of low-use special tools and wiring harnesses.  Tossed them in the
> scrap dumpster or the trash.  Nobody noticed for 8 months that one of
> the things tossed was the 800 cr  engine diagnostic breakout cable,
> until we needed it for something.....
>
> Or the time we were clearing out space in a warehouse, and tossed a
> working C12 engine in the recycle dumpster, "because we needed the
> space".    $12kcr up in smoke. 

They were upgrading the links between the ingot drawing furnaces and
the minicomputer that did some monitoring. Previously the serial data
from a DB-25 connector went into a transciever gizmo that sent it
over twisted pair to the mini.

They were replacing them with a transcievers that used fibre optics.
Given that the furnaces huge ameperages (anything that can make a
large hunk of graphite reach yellow heat is serious amps!) noise had
been a problem even with the twisted pairs.

One of the engineers who was in charge of the mini happened by
towards the end of the refit. He saw the maintenance tech remove the
old transciever (built into a housing that looked a lot like one of
the large "shrouds" for a hand wired DB-25) and toss it in the trash.

He asked the tech what he thought he was doing? The tech said
something like "it's just an adapter".

He informed the tech that no it was not some $5-10 adapter but a $100
transceiver.

Out of something like 100+ furnaces, they only got less than a dozen
of the old transcievers back because nobody had told the maintenances
guys that they were to be salvaged.

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com