$30 Thrift Store Find a $223,000 Jet Engine Valve | Hacker News Reader

$30 Thrift Store Find a $223,000 Jet Engine Valve

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60 pointsiancmceachern53 comments

Is a 3000 dollar valve with 220,000 worth of paperwork. Without the paperwork and a pedigree it’s basically useless

Just to clarify for people who are allergic to “bureaucracy”, paperwork here means a lot of quality assurance tests[1] have been run for the part and each of this test has been duly documented. It's not paperwork for the sake of paperwork!

[1] I'm not too familiar with the aerospace world, but for nuclear that would include shooting gamma rays at the valve in order to see if there's any microscopic crack in it, like you'd do with X rays for humans, but X rays don't go through metal so you need more penetrating radiations.

Let’s assume $500/hour in labor. Did this specific part require 440 hours of testing? The price doesn’t appear to come down at any volume, and the government already substantially subsidized the R&D efforts, so just how much shenanigans do you think there are in that 220,000?

It could be there were many parts made and many of them fail QC. Not to mention a part like this probably has to recoup all of its R&D and overhead costs from its sale because it was likely made by a supplier to Honeywell, not "substantially subsidized the R&D efforts" like you said.

They also are amortizing the cost of all that r&d over less than 5k units. All the tooling too.

This would be my guess.

I worked on microscopes sold to wet labs. When you have limited production runs, the fixed costs, that most of us ignore in saas, become very large on a per-piece basis. Even on 6 figure instruments, to take one that I spent 18 months on, approximately $55k per instrument sold was recovering R&D costs ($20k software, hardware the rest).

While Airbus is almost famous for its “improper subsidies” through Launch Aid, I’d probably focus on just how GE was subsidized in the development of the CF6 engine family through technology transfers, military “system development and demonstration” programs, and layered tax incentive programs from city to federal levels. Airbus, GE, and Honeywell all have benefited from government subsidies. Many others have as well. But if it’s not “substantially subsidized the R&D efforts” like I said, I guess I’m corrected.

A part like this is almost certainty made by a supplier to one of those companies, who does not benefit from government subsidies. Developing the part, tooling, factory, and personnel for an extremely high quality, low part count run is very expensive.

How many of those valves do you think they sell? It’s likely in the hundreds or thousands, so a very low volume item.

How many of them fail to pass the stringent quality tests? The price includes all of the defective valves that failed QA/QC testing.

You still need all of the engineering and tooling, but the costs are spread across a small number of units vs a larger volume product.

> Let’s assume $500/hour in labor.

What about the cost of that gamma ray machine? Those don't sound cheap. And all the other likely very precisely engineered testing apparatus. Overhead is also a cost center.

+1. There's a lot of money invested in having very very high confidence a part is perfect all the way through.

Apparently he can get it recertified at some facilities, who knows he might be able to get a decent return

So 30$ sounds like pretty fair valuation.

My old company would crush tens of thousands of dollars' worth of high-spec optical gear, each year, as opposed to doing things like donating it to nonprofits or schools.

It was absolutely awful. They ignored pleas to donate, because they got slightly more, in tax breaks, by doing axe breaks (literally).

I suspect that this kind of thing is rife, throughout the various industries.

One of my favorite HN articles, is the one about the guy fixing an electron microscope in his garage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42511426

I helped destroy several million dollars worth of superinsulated stainless steel honeycomb vacuum-insulated panels, after the joint venture that produced them dissolved. Crushed with a front-end loader and recycled. I so wished to take a bunch home and superinsulate my attic, but for tax reasons the company needed proof that they had been destroyed. Ref US patent 5826780A. https://patents.google.com/patent/US5826780A/en

not sure what the effective R value would be.. but that could actually cause problems by causing your HVAC to short Cycle.

No risk of that unless the air conditioner is massively oversized and the house is airtight to near-Passive House standards.

And even then, it’s a minor risk which can be dealt with in a decade when the compressor eventually fails, by replacing it with a much smaller unit.

I have a VRF system, which I sized and installed myself, that ain't gonna happen, it will just gently throttle back. Bang-bang control is sooooo 20'th century.

Even window units are dual inverter or three Inverter now! I got two; one regular style and one where the window closes into the middle. There is another type where it hangs like a saddle over the windowsill, and the window closes on top.

You can set the fan to whatever you want, for example, and it will manage the compressor motor, or fully auto.

I'm impressed right now the midea U shaped one is cooling with outdoor ambient below 50F.

"Bang bang control" is great.

how does a company earn more by destroying things instead of donating it?

It's an accounting simplification.

The accountants want to say the item's book value is now $0 (because they can use the loss for a tax break). Destroying the item neatly proves this claim to any auditors, because if the wasn't actually worthless, it is now.

If there is any suggestion that the item should be donated, then it wasn't worthless. It has some value to someone.

This doesn't make donating it impossible. The accountants would just have to update the items book value to its current real value first (they can still count this decrease as a loss). But how do you work out the current real value of the item? You need documentation justifying this new book value that's good enough to satisfy any auditors, and such documentation might be expensive.

I believe most tax codes even allow you to claim the real value of the donated item as loss (as long as it's a registered charity), so the overall tax break should be identical to destroying the item. But the extra time and paperwork makes it much more appealing and cheaper to just take the simple option of just destroying the item, especially when the accounting department is short staffed.

I don't know. That was what I was told, when I begged them to donate it to trade schools for poor folks.

I don't know these particulars, but a school I'm involved with is required to destroy unneeded computers, rather than selling them or giving them to students/parents because the government grant requires that.

I think the idea is to make sure there's no fraud with school funneling free computers (or making money by selling them), but the actual result seems pretty terrible.

probably some accounting rules for valuation. Say book value vs. FMV or something like this.

Most of the time they destroyed this equipment to keep it from getting upcycled on the Grey market to 'white' tagged gear.

> "It's just really amazing that someone discarded hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of commercial aviation parts, even if they are non-functional."

If it is non-functional (and thus no longer hundreds of thousands of dollars) what is one supposed to do with it? Is it some special alloy that can economically be recycled? Is there a path to safely refurbish it to functional condition that operators should actually trust?

It's probably worth more than $30 as a collector's item. There are people who pay hundreds for keychains made from airplane metal. https://planetags.com/

Probably decoration on an engineer or mechanic's desk and it got cleared out. If it broke or aged-out, it was probably just getting tossed in the scrap metal bin, so no one really cares if it turns into office decor.

Or possibly pre-production. Some random feature isn't made the way or with the alloy it's "supposed" to be. Fine for flow bench testing or whatever but not actually usable as a production part.

Original thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ThriftStoreHauls/comments/1isghb0/f...

And the follow-on update: https://www.reddit.com/r/ThriftStoreHauls/comments/1izl04z/u...

> I was contacted by dozens of individuals in all walks of the aviation industry and was given a great deal of good information to move forward with. The first and most important of which was a technician at the Honeywell service center in Tempe Arizona. This was also the facility I intended to contact myself so this save me a phone call which was nice. The technician was kind enough to run a serial number search for me to get additional information about the part. It was originally purchased in the mid 2000s and operated for the better part of a decade by a major airline. The part was serviced a handful of times but how it ended up here was still unclear. They indicated that the part was sent to a lower level service center where they were unable to overhaul it and referred it to the Tempe Arizona facility (where it never arrived, or was never serviced). That was the last record they had and aside from speculation couldn't say much about how it landed in Goodwill.

wild how often this happens now. some no-name publication will write a few paragraphs summarizing a reddit post and call it a news article.

Very cool, although as noted in the article the value of the item found might be 0 as it's not likely to be used for its intended purpose ever again, for good reason.

I used to visit a surplus store that had all sorts of aviation related equipment, worth tons of money if new, but they sold for $5 or $10 a piece.

Airbus part in Washington state? Obviously it was in the personal collection of a departed Boeing engineer and his family didn't know what it was so they just gave it to the thrift store.

Why would a Boeing engineer have a used old Airbus part lying around? It's much more likely that this came from one of the many MROs around the country, for example ATS, who actually works on Airbus aircraft all the time, and is located about 2 miles away from the Boeing plant at Paine Field. https://www.atsmro.com/

Because he liked airplanes. It being an airbus part increases the odds that it was part of a private collection, rather than going through some other route to the thrift store.

I went to high school in the Dayton, OH area and did nerd stuff like Science Olympiad. A favorite source on the team for inexpensive supplies for the building events was Michelson's, a surplus store that stocked capacitors in several aisles and sold wire by the pound.

Besides components, they sold some items in varying degrees of completeness.

I cannot verify any part of this story, but I was talking to the cashier one day, and he told me a story of the store ending up with some items from the cancelled B-1A program.

When the program was revived as the B-1B, some serious-looking men came to the store to retake possession of said items out of concern for them falling into the wrong hands.

Wright Patterson AFB is a short drive away, but I don't know what role it may have played in the B-1 program. If it was involved, I guess it might've plausibly been a source for some surplus to Mendelson's. Note that the B-1 program long predates me.

The employees, on the other hand, were old enough that they could've witnessed the alleged events first-hand. The elevator operator, in particular, looked like he was older than time itself.

The store is sadly now gone, in case anyone was thinking of paying a visit to see what else may have turned up there.

somewhat similar story, told to me back then by the director of that part of the program - when at the end of 199x the Mir space station needed some parts, and all those USSR institutions has been already "privatized" to various extent, they got the necessary parts from the (very famous back then in St.Petersburg "Avtovo" ) flea market and sent the parts to the station.

If it was a Boeing part I would have guessed it fell off in someone's backyard.

As a regular thrift store hunter this is a great find that I’d file under the “oddball” category of my collection. Doubt it’s worth that much given regulations and all that but still a one of a kind, and makes for a great story.

I certainly haven’t found anything even close to this valuable in my 15+ years of hunting, so kudos to Tyler.

Volume manufacturing goes hard huh? I'm not an aerospace engineer so obviously this could be full of inconel widgets machined to abusurd tolerances, but it looks like a $70 car part. I assume that it's just so expensive because you're amortizing development and probably a very heavy regulatory burden over hundreds of parts rather than hundreds of thousands.

I think you're exactly right. It makes me wonder what the actual development, testing and manufacturing costs for it were. Clearly there was some tooling made, see the castings.

Also makes me wonder if we'll start to see some laser-sintered components start to appear in low-volume production. Something like a plenum is an annoying thing to build without going to a casting, unless you 3D print it. With SLS in the mix I wonder where the unit break-even cost is, and whether it would change the testing/material certification chain significantly.

The external appearance can be quite deceiving if there are no critical features or surfaces it won’t be finished beyond its original cast or forged finish.

The inside will be precision machined to exact tolerances and the part will be validated extensively.

Even with all the memes and jokes the safety considerations for commercial passenger flight are insane.

Anyone with significant experience working on cars can tell you some of the problems you get with parts that don't get the scrutiny of parts in the aerospace industry:

* Where did this thing come from and what can I expect from its performance? -- is it new? used? new old stock that has been sitting on a shelf? remanufactured?

* Is this even manufactured to the correct spec? The manufacturer claims this coil pack meets OEM spec, but it doesn't work...?

* Wait, why isn't this bolt going in? The hole isn't threaded?

* Hold up, this part doesn't fit at all.

* These parts don't look factory.... how do I fix this?

* This part broke after one week?

The last thing I want on my airplane is something that was handed over the counter at Autozone.

Sometimes I have the dream where fixing a single perf bug makes everything 500% faster

Or the economic version, what if we (companies and individuals) are just absurdly overpaying for everything?

Could a jet cost 100k instead of 20million? Work from first principles and it can be..

I see it like this:

If you are designing a jetliner filled with human passengers (and the associated liability), first principles might lead you to a culture which puts a high priority on safety. The high cost of safety by design is deemed “worth it”. At least until equity markets and bean counters get their way.

If you are building a military fighter jet, the lesson of war has taught us that skilled pilots are harder to replace than aircraft. Even if the pilots are “government property” from a liability point of view. So again, a costly and meticulous safety culture has evolved.

If you are building an unmanned vehicle, and the development cost of the launch vehicle and payload is more than the incremental unit costs, and you never hand the vehicle over to the customer, then first principles might lead you to consider throwing out the safety culture that was created for the manned vehicle cases. See spacex.

If you get confused between these different situations, then first principles might lead you to OceanGate.

> first principles might lead you to consider throwing out the safety culture that was created for the manned vehicle cases. See spacex.

Is this the case? I thought they'd done multiple crewed flights into space.

Damn, this is incredible and so true.

You can get a jet engine for less than $2000 for small RC planes.

The confidence that that jet engine will actually be robust enough to not loose your UAV or kill somebody will likely cost a lot more in time. If we insist on having engineers sign off on things, that signoff takes time, and it costs money to have smart people reviewing things.

> Could a jet cost 100k instead of 20million? Work from first principles and it can be..

What's your risk tolerance?

> Could a jet cost 100k instead of 20million? Work from first principles and it can be..

How many features do you want to give up?

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