[EAS] Reuse and Recycle...

[ray at electronicstheory.com]

Responding to Clay -
As long as we keep telling that to management - they'll believe it.

I humbly disagree with the "throw it away" mentality.  It is a waste of money.

Truth be told tho - there still are folks out there who can fix such things (me
being one of them).  In our plant, we do still have many devices which require
component level repair, and we've found that some which might be quick and easy
to toss and replace (some computers fall into this category), are repaired quite
cost effectively.  One man in our shop has made it his pet project to change out
caps on motherboards, and has saved the company from buying nearly 100 computers
this year.  Now by doing this, there are compromises- the computers are not
upgraded to the latest and greatest... but in this particular case, the systems
are used in a minimal capacity (internal database and word processing with no
internet allowed), and the boxes run fine.  At (average) $300 per computer, his
changing 2 caps per motherboard he has spent $10 per computer ($3000), and saved
the expense of buying 100 new computers ($30,000).  I dunno about your company -
but paying $3K in capacitors to save $30K in computers is in no way a loss to
our company, and most assuredly, at minimum, he has nearly paid for his own
annual wages in about 10 (total) man hours a year.

This may not be optimal in some situations, but it should always be left as an
option, and teaching young managers otherwise is basically occupational suicide
for the technician/engineer.

Not that this has anything to do with EAS in particular, but I do believe I saw
a post earlier about reusing the old EAS boxes. Our company tries to reuse the
old stuff (even if it needs fixed first) as much as possible.  It greatly
decreases the cost of growth, and saves budget for buying more important
things.... like new engineers or new equipment.

Sorry for the rant folks.... I'll try to stay more on topic from now on.

> Clay Freinwald, still doing it for almost 51 years.
>