Line crew surplus buyers in New York

Why crew surplus is small

A crew does not stock material, it draws it. Conductor is issued against a job from the store, in the quantity the job is expected to need, and the remainder goes back. What stays on the truck is the difference between what was drawn and what was installed, which is normally a short length at the end of a reel rather than a drum.

That is why crew surplus rarely justifies a load on its own and why it accumulates instead. The material builds up in a corner of a store or a yard over months, a drum at a time, and each individual item is too small to sell and too good to scrap. The value is realised by combining, not by selling each piece.

Why it is often the best material in the yard

Three things work in its favour. It is recent, because it was bought for a current job rather than left over from a superseded standard. It has been kept under cover, on a truck or in a store, rather than standing outdoors for years. And it is often still identified, because the tag came off the store rack with the drum and stayed on it.

The condition is usually better than the rest of the yard would suggest. Conductor that spent two weeks on a truck is drier and cleaner than conductor that spent three winters on a rack. Where a part drum has been left on the ground at a laydown yard for a season that advantage disappears, and it is worth saying so per drum rather than describing the whole lot.

The exception is anything used in service during the job: temporary grounds, slings and rope. Those are working items and are valued on condition and inspection, not on newness.

Combining several crew lots

The aim is one consolidated inventory that a buyer can price line by line, rather than four small piles that each fail a minimum. Start by separating the families, because they are valued on completely different bases: conductor on code name and footage, OPGW on fiber count and reel condition, grounding wire on copper content, jumpers on whether the lugs match a conductor size, rope on inspection.

Then combine within family. Four part drums of the same code name become one lot with a total footage, which is a much easier thing to sell than four separate part drums. Mixed code names should stay separate even when they are the same size, because the code name is what a buyer matches to a use.

• Code name on every conductor drum, painted on the flange if the tag is gone
• Footage estimated per drum, and marked as an estimate
• OPGW kept on its reel with the fiber count and any splice information
• Temporary grounds kept complete with their clamps and cables, not loose
• Rope and rigging kept dry and separate, since they are inspected rather than weighed
• A note of which yard each item came from and roughly when

Whose material is it

Material drawn from a store on a requisition belongs to the organisation that issued it, and stays that way until it is returned, written off or formally released. A crew cannot sell surplus it was issued, and a foreman cannot dispose of a part drum to save a trip back to the store. The correct route is the return, and if the material is then declared surplus it leaves through the owner's disposal process with a written release.

Contractor crews are in a slightly different position, because the material may be the contractor's own purchase rather than the utility's stock. Even then the distinction has to be made explicitly, and it is usually made by the purchase record rather than by memory. We ask which it is before anything is loaded, because the answer decides whether the seller can sell at all.

Where material was recovered from a line rather than drawn from a store the same test applies: it belongs to the asset owner until released. Anything still connected, or recently removed and not yet cleared, is not for handling by anyone outside the owner's authorised personnel.