What have you scrapped or salvaged lately ?

[lordvader88]

I'm in a small city and it's pretty hard to get stuff besides CRT TVs and printers. Everything else people just toss it because they don't know people like us would want it.

I was finishing scrapping a laser printer, and I had no idea about the toner, and I spilled it all over my legs/feet/carpet. Thank the gods it vacuumed up.

However I just realized hours later my nose is clogged with it and I went to out super, LOL

[helius]

Ow, sorry to hear that. Vacuuming up toner is actually rather dangerous as it is fine enough to pass through many vacuum cleaner bags, and is also conductive, and can cause sparks or destroy electric motors. It's suggested to only use special vacuum cleaners designed for that purpose:
http://www.crawfordtool.com/3M_servicevacuum.html

It's a good idea to breathe as little toner as possible, since it can be respired deep into the lungs.

[notlegato]

Whoops. Yeah I took apart a printer the other day- fortunately neat. Got a few DC motors out of the thing and basically just a few big caps and coils.
Disappointment, really. Motors were nice, but a basic desktop printer is kind of empty, so lots of trouble for very little.

Made a fume extractor out of some old PC fans though (

).

[Fludo]

I took apart a rack mount UPS which had bad batteries.  It was destined for the scrap pile so the wires had been cut out.
Goodies inside:
1.5kVA transformer
PCB mount isolation transformer
Hi power MOSFETs
Ceramic and electrolytic caps
various step down transformers
A small current sensor that looks like a space ship
8x 3 pole 240VAC 15A relays pcb mounted

[joseph nicholas]

I took apart a Tek 453 scope with the crt, boards transformer and other misc parts sitting in the lab.

[lordvader88]

Ow, sorry to hear that. Vacuuming up toner is actually rather dangerous as it is fine enough to pass through many vacuum cleaner bags, and is also conductive, and can cause sparks or destroy electric motors. It's suggested to only use special vacuum cleaners designed for that purpose:
http://www.crawfordtool.com/3M_servicevacuum.html

It's a good idea to breathe as little toner as possible, since it can be respired deep into the lungs.

Yeah it's full of carbon, I thought of that, hopefully it's not into my computer very much.

I took apart a Tek 453 scope with the crt, boards transformer and other misc parts sitting in the lab.

Nice, I have Tek 422 I'm re-capping and trying to figure out if the PSU is working right or not. They sure are a work of art inside

[byoungblood]

Picked up an 80s active graphic equalizer off of the curb walking around the neighborhood a couple of weeks back. Probably will just salvage all of the sliding pots, op-amps, transformer, etc., from it.

Picked up a 50s RCA console hi-fi system cheap today. Turntable, AM/FM(!) radio, mono output with a 6V6 push-pull output (so probably about 15-20 watts) driving a 12" and two 3.5" speakers. Lady I bought it from said it did nothing but hum one time she turned it on, no surprise the filter caps are bad. I was originally thinking about parting it out, but the pictures she had did it no justice, it is actually a nice piece and would probably clean up nicely with just some furniture polish and a steal for the $25 I paid. Don't really have room for it here at the house, so I may just re-cap, check the radio alignment and flip it.