I'd do it something like this (trying to reconstruct the spec by reverse engineering your script):

open(INFILE, $file) or die "Can't open $file: $!\n";
open(OUTFILE, $file) or die "Can't open $outfile: $!\n";

# widths of the cols
my @cols = qw(3 50 7 7 7 7 6 6 6 6 55 4 41 6 23 7 169);
# build unpack format
my $fmt = join '', map { "A$_" } @cols;

# column names
my @col_names = qw(mfg model spec1 spec2 spec3 spec4 opt1
                   opt2 opt3 opt4 desc qoh trash1 mult
                   trash2 list trash3);

while (<INFILE>) {
  my %rec;

  $rec{@col_names} = unpack $fmt, $_;

  next if $rec{model} = 'COMPONENT PARTS';

  print OUTFILE join('|', $rec{@col_names})
}
[download]

Which looks a bit simpler than your version :)

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me