07-12-2016, 07:10 AM
You may be expecting too much, Pete. If the company is liquidating then the people there probably don't know a thing about the equipment, nor care. The machinery is left in the way of selling or leasing a commercial building for other purposes, and anyone there likely wants to move on to the next liquidation.
The big vise may have been on the floor somewhere so to get rid of it, someone threw it on the nearest machine. It's all speculation on my part, but my point is that under the conditions of a building needing to be cleared out, it's often a case of "get it out of here in the next week or call the scrapper to haul it away."
In one instance a number of years ago, I had a similar situation. The company I worked for was buying a CNC horizontal machining center that was in good shape, and it had an auxiliary 4th axis rotary table sitting a few feet away. That was being sold separately, but it was OE to the machine we were buying. It took some negotiation (a $100 in cash worked amazing) but we were able to convince the seller to include it with the machine. This was a liquidator hired to just get whatever they could as long as the building was emptied.
The big vise may have been on the floor somewhere so to get rid of it, someone threw it on the nearest machine. It's all speculation on my part, but my point is that under the conditions of a building needing to be cleared out, it's often a case of "get it out of here in the next week or call the scrapper to haul it away."
In one instance a number of years ago, I had a similar situation. The company I worked for was buying a CNC horizontal machining center that was in good shape, and it had an auxiliary 4th axis rotary table sitting a few feet away. That was being sold separately, but it was OE to the machine we were buying. It took some negotiation (a $100 in cash worked amazing) but we were able to convince the seller to include it with the machine. This was a liquidator hired to just get whatever they could as long as the building was emptied.