Sad Unisaw Story

[Michael Gibbons]

There must be a very good reason that escapes me at the moment why the company wouldn't sell it as scrap to an employee vs a "scrap company" but I can't think of it right now. If the regular scrap company will give .15 a pound let the employee pay .20/lb. At this point, does it really matter who ends up with the Uni if it is considered scrap?

[Joe Jensen]

There must be a very good reason that escapes me at the moment why the company wouldn't sell it as scrap to an employee vs a "scrap company" but I can't think of it right now. If the regular scrap company will give .15 a pound let the employee pay .20/lb. At this point, does it really matter who ends up with the Uni if it is considered scrap?

My company quit letting employees buy or bid on scrap because they were worried employees might send something useful to scrap just to buy it later from the company. Probably some unethical jerk in the past ruined it for others down the road.

[Michael Gibbons]

On your $5 million machine, there would be no reason to scrap out the machine, but there might be a reason to examine the lockout mechanism to see if there's a way of preventing the same type of accident in the future. If your company is like most companies, they had an internal investigation into what happened and probably came up with a number of changes to try to prevent a similar accident in the future.

With the saw, it was cheaper and easier to replace the saw than to try to put equivalent safety features on the old one.

Regarding selling the old saw, the company is likely to only get a few hundred dollars for it, not enough to take the risk, even with a release from the buyer.

Mike

Mike, you are exactley right! They do the investigations, OSHA is called, everyone is on pins and needles while the investigations are going on and procedures are reviewed but when it comes down to brass tacks, it's in the 98% range that it was OPERATOR ERROR. The machine was not right-and that was the reason the skilled trades guy was in the machine-to fix it-but he didn't lock out.

[Van Huskey]

My company quit letting employees buy or bid on scrap because they were worried employees might send something useful to scrap just to buy it later from the company. Probably some unethical jerk in the past ruined it for others down the road.

Exactly, that was even jockingly mentioned early in this thread.