Selling Surplus Fanuc Boards and Servo Amplifiers

When a CNC machine or a robot leaves the plant, its spare Fanuc boards and amplifiers usually stay behind. Smart money knows this, it’s just hard to spot on a storeroom report.

If you plan to sell surplus Fanuc circuit boards, PCBs or servo amplifiers, start with the machines that already left – it’s usually the most overlooked spot/

Fanuc hit 5 million CNC units produced in February 2022, four years after crossing 4 million.

That sounds like 5 million buyers for your spare boards.

It isn’t. Wish we could chnage this for you.

Your board fits one control generation, one revision, one slot. The buyer is whoever still runs that old-timey machine.

And every year, fewer shops do.

Machines get replaced for speed, for automation, or because the old control finally quit and the retrofit penciled out. Each one takes a buyer off the list.

The Machine Left. The Spares Stayed.

This is how a Fanuc shelf gets built, one retired machine at a time.

• The auction. “The old lathe went to auction” is what the plant manager says. “The lathe went to auction and its spare amplifiers stayed in our cage” is what the storeroom count says, and is correct.
• The spares. “Fanuc stuff never dies, so we keep it” is the clean version. “The machine it fit left in 2019” is the real version.
• The shelf. “It’s Fanuc, somebody will always need it”… good one. “One buyer running one control generation needs one revision, and he’s budgeting his own retrofit” is how serious it actually is.

Now the numbers:

• 5 million CNC units by early 2022, with Fanuc’s own production reaching 36,500 CNCs a month. Every new control is a future retirement for an old one.
• 1 million robots shipped by August 2023. Robot controllers run on the same families of servo amplifiers as the machine tools.
• Three prefixes cover most of what’s sitting in your cage: A06B for servo and spindle amplifiers and motors, A16B and A20B for circuit boards, A860 for pulse coders.

The insiders catch?. None of those numbers describe your buyer pool. They describe everybody who ever bought a Fanuc control. They are all over, each competing for SEO space.

If you want to sell surplus Fanuc amplifiers and boards, the only question that matters is whether that control generation is still running somewhere.

Bottom line: a Fanuc spare only has a buyer while somebody still runs the machine it came from.

And if you hold on to it… well, your paying for it instaed of it paying you.

The Fanuc spares are almost never on the main storeroom count. We usually find them in the maintenance office, in the anti-static bags they arrived in, on some racking covered in 1/8″ of black dust.

How to Sell Surplus Fanuc Parts Without a Repair Bill

Three moves allowing you to tell the test bench to pound sand

The plants that sell surplus Fanuc spares fastest skip the prep work entirely.

1. Pull every spare tied to a machine that’s gone.
   • List every CNC machine and robot you’ve auctioned, scrapped or replaced in the last ten years.
   • Every spare that fit one of them is merchandise now.
   • Sort by prefix, not by guess: A06B servo and spindle amplifiers, A16B and A20B PCBs, A860 pulse coders.
   • Group it the way buyers buy it: circuit boards, PCBs and automation and servo amplifiers, drives and motors.
   • Count the line items. That’s the shelf you’ve been paying rent on since the machine left.
2. Sell it as it sits.
   • Leave boards in their anti-static bags and amplifiers in their boxes.
   • New in box and new surplus move fastest. Pulled units still have buyers too.
   • “We’ll send the amps out for repair first.” That’s a repair bill on merchandise you’re about to sell. Skip it. So you’re going to get a repair and holding cost bil… Just skip it.
   • Every month spent prepping is a month another shop retires the control that board fits.
3. Move the whole Fanuc shelf in one lot.
   • Don’t list boards one at a time. That’s a two-year side project nobody signed up for.
   • Send the full list, part numbers and quantities, and ask for one offer.
   • Who takes the A20B boards and the orphan pulse coders in the same truck? That buyer exists.
   • “We’ll hang on to them in case.” Sure. Sit on them a few more years and you pay for them again, with fewer buyers at the end of it.

Five Million Controls, One Buyer at a Time

That’s the market in one line.

Fanuc keeps shipping new controls. Plants keep retrofitting and replacing the old ones.

Electromechnical, industrial automation, industrial robotics, factory automation, roboautomation; they all move fast. Its no longer a mature prodcuts market; obsolesnce is quick.

Machines outlive their controls. The spares outlive everybody’s memory of why they were ordered.

Every retrofit leaves a drawer of spare boards and amplifiers for a machine that isn’t there anymore.

Two camps come out of it.

The first camp forgets the drawer. Five years later somebody cleans out the maintenance office, nobody remembers which machine anything fit, and the recycler weighs it. Oh, and FYI – you paid for it over twice.

The second camp sells the spares the same quarter the machine leaves. Clean drawer, check cashed, done.

Where do they go? Not back to Fanuc. Most likely overseas, or to a job shop still running that exact control because the machine under it still holds tolerance.

A machine that still holds tolerance doesn’t get scrapped over one bad amplifier. It gets a used one, from whoever sold theirs first.

That shop isn’t shopping for fun. His spindle is down and your amplifier is the only one he can find.

You free up frozen cash, they get that legacy machine back in motion.

Take the emotion out of it. Nobody wants to admit they bought three spare amplifiers for a lathe that left two years later. But you might as well get some cash for it, right?

The plants that sell surplus Fanuc spares on purpose get paid for them. The ones that wait give them to the recycler.

What to watch: your own capital plan. Every CNC replacement or control retrofit on next year’s budget orphans another shelf of A06B and A20B spares. Clearing PLCs and drives too? Here’s how to sell surplus PLCs.

Selling now = not paying for another year of storage and reducing your tax exposure.

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