"Accidental" auction win: IBM mainframe, Avaya telecom parts and old phones- oh my!

Hi howdy all-

It's been a while since I've done any interesting scrapping, but I thought I would post a couple pictures of (and ask a few questions about) what turned out to be a rather large lot of electronic equipment I purchased recently. It was one of those cases where I wasn't actually supposed to win the lot, but someone else forgot to outbid me. Whoops. Sometimes lowballs work.

First, the main picture from the auction lot- a mid-90s IBM mainframe:





I'll becoming with a trailer for that on Thursday. But that's not all- there were two more smallish truckloads of boxes, bits and pieces. You obviously can't really tell what's going on here except that I really wanted to make sure I didn't have to make a fourth trip:




I won't list everything here, but there were a few old routers, a box of desktop 7400 modems, about 50 digital telephones, a whole bunch of computer and telecom cables (I'll post some more pictures later), some spare telecom boards and a few of whatever these things are:






According to the labels this is an Avaya "PPN to EPN Duplex" gizmo (product id 107998). I haven't found much about these online- I'm thinking they are obsolete and not resell-able. Anyone know if this is true? I noticed jimicrk posted a picture of a stack of what looked like the boards of these things and called them PBX back planes. I'm pretty inexperienced with telecom equipment- would you recommend chopping into this thing and isolating the board? I've already put a few items (mostly cables) up on Ebay, but frankly, I don't want to waste my time with this thing if I don't have to.

Many thanks for any advice, and I'll post a few more pictures of stuff soon.

Thanks and cheers,
thebugguy

Nice win!!

The last 3 pics look like an expansion cabinet for an Avaya Difinity PBX. There are still a lot of old phone systems out there and the businesses using them still need parts. Finding them is the problem.
You could try ebay and see what happens. You never know who's looking for that 1 hard to find part.

Thanks. I very well may try it on Ebay just to see what happens. If I don't get around to it (or it doesn't sell), what's the scrap value of the back planes themselves- any idea?

I'm too beat to take pictures of the telecom boards, but I found these "extras" in the storage compartment of one of the IBM tape backup towers. I'm hoping to recover more as I dig through these things!



Cheers,
tbg

Look at the phones to see if you have a 302c they are big $.
Avaya Lucent 302C Black Attendant Console Black with 26B1 B 003 DSS Console | eBay

Originally Posted by Immulmen

Look at the phones to see if you have a 302c they are big $.
Avaya Lucent 302C Black Attendant Console Black with 26B1 B 003 DSS Console | eBay

Yeesh. Last night I swore that I would break down all the phones from the lot to get them out of my way- and I did. There were a couple odd models (including two examples with an extra console), but they weren't the one listed on Ebay (phew!). Still, this illustrates an excellent rule of thumb: if you find yourself with a pile of 50 items and 49 of them are all the same, you might want to spend a little extra time figuring out what's so special about the 50th!

cheers,
tbg

Well, I'm irritated that I forgot to bid on this, as I got tied up at my "real" job. I had looked at this lot several times over the past days. However, I'm glad someone that is a member of this forum got the bid. Congratulations and I do hope that you do well on this haul. It looks like you should.

Nice score on the mainframes, you will do very well with them! I scrapped several different mainframes in the last few years (HP, Hitachi, Silicon Graphics, etc) and did extremely well on all. Even if there are zero resale parts, the scrap values can be very good, far superior to any PC or server.

Originally Posted by numbers

Well, I'm irritated that I forgot to bid on this, as I got tied up at my "real" job. I had looked at this lot several times over the past days. However, I'm glad someone that is a member of this forum got the bid. Congratulations and I do hope that you do well on this haul. It looks like you should.

Hello and howdy, numbers- Good to hear from you! Sorry this one slipped by you, but I'm glad we didn't wind up bidding against each other- that's just throwing money down the toilet. I check the local auctions about once or twice a month but I rarely bid on anything and almost never win. I think I'm averaging about one winning bid per year over the last few years, and generally that's only when people like you happen to be not paying attention at just the right (wrong) time.

I don't mean to rub it in, but to answer mikeinreco's question the lot cost me just shy of $100. That includes tax and commission, but not $20 in gas for three trips to Topeka and another $15 for buying my Father-in-Law lunch today for helping to get the big pieces back to Lawrence. This afternoon I got my first $20 back by making a quick run to the yard to drop off some steel and about 30 lbs of #3 insulated (about 20 lbs of which were the cords for all the darn phones I took apart).

I figure I'll double or triple my money (which wasn't much of an investment to begin with) with some elbow grease and the scrap value alone. Is it "worth" it? I dunno- I don't do this for a living so it's just kind of fun. I'll try throwing some parts up on Ebay before I tear them down, but without being able to test anything I'm not expecting a whole lot for the time spent. Still, flipping even a handful of items for bargain prices will pad my bottom line a little.

I'll post a couple more pictures here in a few minutes...

cheers,
tbg

Ok, here's a shot of pretty much just the mainframe components- not a lot of room (or weight tolerance) to spare! I've been calling her HAL-E, which is sort of a combo of WALL-E and HAL from 2001 A Space Odyssey. And that's my FiL, definitely earning his lunch...




There were four (now three) IBM 3174-L1 "controllers" in the lot. Here's what one looks like taken apart:



I haven't completely weighed it out yet and will likely try to re-sell some of the components, but given that the body is plastic, there's not a lot of metal here- about 12 pounds of steel and 8+ pounds cast aluminum. The back plane weighs about 3.25 lbs, but there's not a whole lot going on there, so it may not be worth much for scrap...

More later... cheers!
thebugguy

Ok, I've processed three of the four 3174-L1 controllers, making enough room to start chopping into the first of two IBM 6400 printers. For the record, here are the guts:




I didn't strip it down to the studs (I may try to sell or give away the cabinet) and I didn't include the relatively small amount of plastic trash that came out of it in the pictures. Again, apart from the cabinet, there's not a lot of steel here and only a pound or so of stainless (I have a thing about collecting stainless steel rods from printers). There is about 18 lbs of 99% clean cast Al though and another couple lbs of "dirty" Al as well as four nice step motors and a fifth motor of a type I've never seen (you can see the exposed windings in the photo). Apart from a couple honking caps, the logic board looks pretty nice and there was another decent board in the control panel as well as the standard LCD board.

As with the unit I did yesterday, there's a pretty steep learning curve, but once you've taken one apart, the second goes a lot faster!

cheers,
tbg