Brother GX-8000 electric typewriter

I find a lot of the same stuff over and over again, so it's nice to find something completely out of left field. Case in point, I found not one but two electric typewriters in a single pile a couple of weeks ago. The other one will show up in a later entry.

Funny thing is, I've taken a couple of manual typewriters apart many years ago, but I don't remember ever getting a hold of an electric until now. I wonder if this is a fluke, or if they will become more common as offices that rarely get cleaned up begin to throw out old equipment.

This thing was pretty nasty when I found it, so I had to clean it up a little before I started to tear it down. The keyboard cover served it's purpose rather well, since the keys themeselves stayed remarkably clean.

The ribbon cartridge had some cool little pieces in it, plus the outer case had a texture pattern that might make its way into some future project.

The keyboard is its own unit, unlike in a manual typewriter.

The keys are attached to the top of the unit instead of the bottom, like with computer keyboards.

Popping all those keys off was a pain in the ass.

The head or cassette or whatever it's called. Not many removable parts here.

I photographed the parts in two sections. The first group includes all the parts with the exceptions of the keys and the little post theings that held the keys in. Just these would be a fairly decent parts haul...

...but these are an added bonus. I have no idea what I'll do with most of them, and to be honest, i've purged excess identical keys from my collection of crap before to make room for less repetitive crap, but on the other hand it's nice to have a lot of redundant parts to test paints or adhesives on, or to practice with new tools. I'm not exactly a fan of Joseph Stalin, but he summed up my feelings on keyboard keys rather well when he said "Quantity has a quality all its own."

Soyo motherboard, model unknown

Why didn't I make an entry last week? Well, it's because of the subject of this entry.



Up until last Friday, this was the heart of my computer. I had been using it for at least three and a half years, with essentially no issues until about six or so months ago. Sometimes it wouldn't boot up on the first try or just shut itself off in the middle of me using it. Presumably, the latter problem was due to overheating, and it was saving itself from burning out. This time, it didn't save itself and the processor burned out, taking out the motherboard with it. This pissed me off because I was looking at buying an all new computer in a few months. But then this one had to go and get shot three days before retirement, to borrow a movie cliche. I don't have the scratch right now to move the purchase up, so I had to buy a new board and processor (the cheapest one they had) so I can keep working.


When I say burned out, I mean it in the most literal sense. That brown crap is what's left of the thermal putty.


I keep parts of pretty much everything I disassemble, and usually refer to them as trophies, and I guess the term is vaguely accurate, though most of what I take apart has no value to me, senitmental or otherwise, and I just want the parts for art projects that may or may not ever happen. However, when I take apart something I owned, the trophy is as much of a reminder as it is a piece of something I plan to make. Not that I have much attachment to this motherboard, but I'll probably remember that these parts did indeed come out of something of mine.

If this was in a junkpile, I wouldn't have even bothered to take it home. The parts haul is rather small, though bigger than several sewing machine teardowns. However, I like those clips fro holding the RAM in place, and I especially like multiple identical parts, so I may actually grap CPUs when I see them.

Epson Stylus CX6400 printer/scanner

After several weeks of rather lame disassemblies, it's nice to have something to take apart with some meat on the bones. Or rather, it's nice to have a write-up of something with meat on its bones, since I don't necessarily write these things in order. I was saving this one for when I had a little more time than usual to write it, and now its the last appliance in my buffer, so I have to write about it one way or another. I've got the time right now, but I don't feel like waxing nostalgic or droning on, so I'll let the pictures do most of the talking.

This is a relatively new printer/scanner, and I can't remember anything being obviously wrong with it, visually anyway. There used to be a top lid on this, but I had to leave it behind to get the whole thing home.

The scanner bed. Not much to take apart here.

The control panel came off in one piece, which I'll get to momentarily. Most printers I scrap have a plastic body shell that lifts off of the flatter base, while this one has the flatter part on top. It gives the whole thing a 'bucket of parts' effect. Actually, the pastic body is in three main parts, so there is a flat base, but it comes off seperately

The aforementioned control panel, which has those rubber multi-button sheets that I have no use for.

With the walls removed, the printer/scanner looks more like any other run of the mill inkjet printer.

Not a bad parts haul. The second picture shows some of the smaller parts in more detail.