[Test-Equipment] Test Equipment 'Black Hole'

[Michael D. Harmon]

My experience has been that the following places are the usual 
repositories for the items mentioned:

Scope Covers - Bottom drawer of equipment cabinet
Instruction Manuals - File Cabinet in Shop
Probes, adapters, witches hats, ground leads - Top drawer of bench
EMI screens, viewing hoods, little color-coded probe ID clips, probe 
holders with double sided tape - Scope pouch or trash can

After all, none of these things have inventory numbers.  Several years 
later when the decision is made to buy new test equipment, the only 
thing the inventory control people are looking for is something with an 
inventory number.  Everything else stays where it's been for the past 
several years.  The old equipment is either trashed, traded in or 
surplused out, minus of course all the 'accessories' still living in the 
shop drawers.

Heck, when I worked at an FM broadcast station back in the Seventies, 
the inventory control people would have etched inventory numbers on our 
stock of spare transistors if they could have figured out how to do it!

About 15-20 years ago, I bought a Cushman CE-3 service monitor from a 
guy I worked with.  He had bought 3 or 4 years earlier at a surplus 
property auction at one of our district offices.  I found out where he 
had gotten it and called the radio tech at the district office to ask if 
there was any possibility that they still had the manual in their 
files.  He called me back a couple of days later to say that he had 
found the manual and 'some other stuff' and would bring them to our 
headquarters office the next time he was in town. A couple of months 
later I came into work and found a medium size box on my desk, along 
with a note from the guy.  It contained the manual, the 20 dB attenuator 
pad, a spare crystal oven, and a couple of plugins!  He said he found 
everything on the big storage cabinet in the engineering shop in a box 
labeled 'Cushman'.

So the moral of the story is that if you can determine where the 
equipment came from and the name of the 'guardian' while it was there, 
you might have a miniscule chance of finding the 'accessories'.

73,
Mike, WB0LDJ
mharmon at att dot net