Sign Auctions blow my mind

[ams]

A sign shop in North Carolina has gone to auction and they are selling everything from their Roland printers/cutters to laminators, heat presses, vinyl, furniture, etc.

But what gets me is like their Roland Sol Jet 54" printer. It has 6 print heads, the machine has been turned off and the lines were not flushed, it's been like that for a couple of months. All the print heads are going to be ruined, going to maybe need new lines and everything. Print heads are around $1,200 each so that is $7,200 plus if you need to have a tech put one in and align it, that's usually 2 hours max per printhead, normal fee is $100 / hour plus travel so another $1,500. Who knows what else is wrong with it. So you spend $8,700 + to fix it up when more can be damaged with it. The bid is at like $5,000 as is. I'd rather buy a new one instead of going through all of that torture.

 

[SightLine]

Yup..... that place was pretty big and highly specialized in graphics for BMX bikes. There is a secondary auction with a ton of apparel, bike parts, complete bikes, etc. On the sign side they have several Gerber Edge 2 machines (those "should" be fine), Gerber cutters, rewinders, tons of materials, a few different inkjet printers including the outdated (printers based on multiple DX4 heads came out nearly 15 years ago, just because a couple of companies kept making them based on the DX4 heads instead of moving on to the much better DX5 or other far newer heads is beyond me) Roland you mentioned, tables, office equipment, etc. Regardless, yeah its sad to see machines that get the cord yanked out and left to dry. Unfortunately that is how it goes with forced bankruptcy seizures. I had it happen to a mega corporate I worked for about 20 years ago. Inacom had over 20,000 employees worldwide with major contracts. Literally within 1 hours of the courts ordering immediate shutdown everything at the headquarters was literally just unplugged. Website, phone systems, everything.... major players like power companies waiting on parts for servers, etc all just immediately cut off from all communication, etc. I remember getting a page on the Nextel to call in immediately regarding the bankruptcy filing (they expected to be able to reorganize and everything would keep going). It was a recording. The girl sounded like she was running in a hallway, said company was shut down immediately, since Inacom is self insured insurance benefits, etc immediately terminated, gather all personal belongings and vacate any company premises immediately, court personnel on the way to lock the places up.

I looked since I could drive up there in about two hours but there is really nothing that I'm really needing or wanting that they had. As far as the machines sitting, that's to be expected when a place like that has a catastrophic financial failure. They went bankrupt, court ordered immediate closure and seizure of all assets, property foreclosing, all assets being auctioned off to pay the debtors who got left holding the bag. My understanding is they started off great with a couple of the original folks from Motorsports Design who left to start this venture. They cornered the market specializing in BMX graphics and clearly showed they had the BMX market locked in by a large margin. They literally became an industry icon in the BMX world doing major sponsorships and closely partnering with KTM. After some number of years on top of their game they got bought up and things still did good for quite some time but started in a downward financial spiral which eventually did them in back in January.

 

[ams]

It is a shame. Too bad they didn't ask other sign shops how to maintain the equipment for auction or offered it to them out of auction.

 

[BALLPARK]

Can you view the items online and bid online?

Thanks

 

[ProColorGraphics]

What place was this?

 

[ams]

https://www.ironhorseauction.com/au...ce-furniture-and-computers-north-wilke-bw3324

 

[James Burke]

Aside from some of the aforementioned potentially problematic equipment, there appears to be a bunch of nice stuff up for bid.


JB

 

[SightLine]

They don't show it well on their website but the actual online bidding part is here
https://www.proxibid.com/aspr/Iron-Horse-Auction-Company-Inc/1683/AuctionsByCompany.asp?ahid=1683

 

[Jwalk]

I thought this was going to be about old painted signs going for big money.

 

[MikePro]

my boss is still giddy from scoring 40-rolls of .040 x 5" channel letter coil at 10cents on the dollar, after one of our competitors went belly-up a couple years ago. Got a few other toys as well, but hot damn that was a sweet deal.

 

[Gino]

Yeah, it looked some really good deals took place on that one.

 

[ams]

I thought this was going to be about old painted signs going for big money.

Your so freaking funny... not

 

[ams]

*You're

You're an idiot. Case closed