The gear is being sold for much less than its cost to areas that are short of capital but have plenty of low-cost labor.

"The innards are up for sale," said Jerry Vriesenga, president of Dole Foods-Hawaii, Waialua's parent. Since the North Shore mill closed forever Oct. 4, he has been evaluating written offers for the equipment.

"We have the complete sugar mill and we have the support equipment, including all the field equipment," he said. Likely it will be sold to a sugar producer in a Third-World country, Vriesenga said.

That's what generally happens to the equipment from Hawaii's failing sugar industry, equipment that made Hawaii's sugar industry so productive that it could keep going for years in the face of soaring costs, industry experts say.

The buildings remain, and while there are no plans for the factory at Waialua, other than using a small part to generate electricity for Hawaiian Electric Co., the other dead mills on Oahu have alternative uses either in place or planned.

Alexander & Baldwin Inc.'s Kahuku Plantation mill, closed in November 1971, was spruced up by commercial operators and opened as a tourist-oriented shopping complex four years later.

In Aiea, the mill that was opened in 1898 by Honolulu Plantation Co., ceased to grind sugar cane in the 1940s. The building stayed, however, coverted in 1947 into a California and Hawaiian Sugar Co. refinery.

That operation was replaced in 1993 by a small high-technology plant alongside the old factory, producing liquid sugar for bakers and candy makers. Even that function will be over early next year.

However, its new life began to take shape in late 1994, when Crazy Shirts Hawaii bought the old factory and its 20-acre site for $18 million and announced plans to convert it into a tourist-attraction sportswear factory, warehouse, offices and retail space. Privately owned Crazy Shirts will spend $10 million-plus on the building and move in the next year.

In Waipahu, the Oahu Sugar Co. mill, which ended its operating life in April of last year, is to be converted into a cultural-heritage museum and community center by owner Amfac/JMB Hawaii Inc. The plans also call for a YMCA on the property and some commercial use.

All that remains of Hawaii's oldest sugar mill, at Kualoa on the windward coast, is the brick chimney of the sugar boiling plant. That mill, built by members of the historic Judd and Wilder families, operated for only eight years and was shut down in 1871 when it became unprofitable to grow sugar in the area.

Robert H. Hughes, former director of what was then the Hawaii Sugar Planters' Association, has been involved in mill equipment sales himself. Now retired and working on a history of Hawaii's sugar factories, Hughes said that the equipment from those that closed down in the past was either cannibalized for use elsewhere by the owners or sold off, sometimes at auction sometimes in private sales, to places that saw it as affordable.

"But you're not looking at a fabulous gold mine," Hughes said.