[HN Gopher] $30 Thrift Store Find a $223,000 Jet Engine Valve
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$30 Thrift Store Find a $223,000 Jet Engine Valve
Author : iancmceachern
Score : 51 points
Date : 2025-02-25 05:59 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.avweb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.avweb.com)
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| abeppu wrote:
| > "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?
| dharmab wrote:
| 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/
| thot_experiment wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| 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.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| 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.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| 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..
| comfysocks wrote:
| 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.
| mlinhares wrote:
| Damn, this is incredible and so true.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| You can get a jet engine for less than $2000 for small RC
| planes.
|
| The confidence that that jet engine will actually be robust
| enough to not loose your UAV or kill somebody will likely cost
| a lot more in time. If we insist on having engineers sign off
| on things, that signoff takes time, and it costs money to have
| smart people reviewing things.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > Could a jet cost 100k instead of 20million? Work from first
| principles and it can be..
|
| What's your risk tolerance?
| daedrdev wrote:
| > Could a jet cost 100k instead of 20million? Work from first
| principles and it can be..
|
| How many features do you want to give up?
| nothercastle wrote:
| Is a 3000 dollar valve with 220,000 worth of paperwork. Without
| the paperwork and a pedigree it's basically useless
| archontes wrote:
| +1. There's a lot of money invested in having very very high
| confidence a part is perfect all the way through.
| Ekaros wrote:
| So 30$ sounds like pretty fair valuation.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| Den_VR wrote:
| 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?
| daedrdev wrote:
| 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.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| They also are amortizing the cost of all that r&d over
| less than 5k units. All the tooling too.
| Den_VR wrote:
| 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.
| nujabe wrote:
| Apparently he can get it recertified at some facilities, who
| knows he might be able to get a decent return
| dehrmann wrote:
| 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.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| 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.
| johann8384 wrote:
| If it was a Boeing part I would have guessed it fell off in
| someone's backyard.
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| buildsjets wrote:
| 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/
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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
| nujabe wrote:
| how does a company earn more by destroying things instead of
| donating it?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I don't know. That was what I was told, when I begged them to
| donate it to trade schools for poor folks.
| ars wrote:
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| probably some accounting rules for valuation. Say book value
| vs. FMV or something like this.
| phire wrote:
| 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 brake). 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 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.
| buildsjets wrote:
| 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
| ericcumbee wrote:
| not sure what the effective R value would be.. but that could
| actually cause problems by causing your HVAC to short Cycle.
| simondotau wrote:
| 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.
| buildsjets wrote:
| 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.
| sharkweek wrote:
| 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.
| omoikane wrote:
| Original thread:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ThriftStoreHauls/comments/1isghb0/f...
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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.
| svieira wrote:
| And the follow-on update:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ThriftStoreHauls/comments/1izl04z/u...
| svieira wrote:
| > 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.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| 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.
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