Epson Action Laser 1500

OK, before I talk about anything else, I have to make a snide remark about the name 'Action Laser.' Seriously Epson? I can understand having 'laser' in the name, since it's a laser printer, but what about printing says 'action?' Action Laser sounds like the name on a particularly cheap dollar store toy whose Chinese manufacturer didn't spring for the good translators.

This is the second printer of the three I got a couple of weeks ago. It's also the largest of all of them (and probably approaching the size limit of anything I can get home without anything other than a bike), as well as the most enjoyable. The parts that looked like they should come off did for the most part, and without much fuss, and there were indeed a lot of parts.


Here it is in all its beige and bulky glory.


And here's the toner cartridge, which I removed and took apart before the printer itself.

I got a few parts out of it, but I didn't want to tear in to it with any gusto, for fear of spilling toner all over the place. A little bit leaked, but I was able to make short work of it with the vacuum cleaner and a wet paper towel.

Back to the printer itself, I started by removing the top access panel. There's even some parts to take off on that.


Taking that one panel off revealed a lot of parts, but I had to take the rest of the panels off to actually get at them.


I decided to keep this control panel mostly intact for the time being, much like the keyboard in the previously discussed typewriter, since it's easier to keep up with the whole unit rather than all the little parts.


The chassis of the printer, almost picked clean at this point.


I got a lot of parts out of this printer, so it was definitely worth the aggravation of having to carry it back on a bicycle.

Brother GX-8250 electric typewriter

Remember a few weeks ago when I said I found two typewriters, but I only wrote about one? Well, now I'm finally getting around to doing an entry for the second one. For the most part, the two machines were very similar, so the breakdowns were also pretty much alike. In other words, there's not mch to say about this typewriter that I didn't say in the previous entry.

I think this is a newer model than the other one I took apart. The body has a more curved or rounded shape, i.e. it looks more modern. I could look it up to verify, but I don't care that much right now.

The ribbon cartridge. There's a few nice little pieces in there, plus I like the texture of the outer casing.

Here's the head (I guess that's the right term), with the daisy wheel and correction ribbon...

...and here it is removed from the rest of the typewriter. This one was a more complex design than the other typewriter, and it lent itself a bit more to disassembly.

The keyboard, again, very much like the other one. However, rather than remove all the keys, I decided to just leave them on the board piece, just to keep them all together. I'm just going to store this with the rest of my bulk plastic parts.

This is a decent trophy pile, I think. Lots of interestingly-shaped gears and rollers and so forth.

Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 6p

The run-up to heavy trash day this month had a shockingly large crop of printers. Not just chump home printers, but large business machines. One is even a printer/fax. Of course the downside of large printers is getting them back to the apartment. They wouldn't fit in my big duffel bag, and I don't have a trailer or cargo rack for the bike, so I was reduced to balancing a printer on my seat as I walked the bike back. I have to wonder what passing drivers thought I was doing. Unfortunately, due to size and distance restrictions meant I could only nab three of the five printers I saw.

Teardowns of big printers like this are always entertaining, though this one was more toward the 'meh' end of the 'good' range, if that makes any sense. I got a decent amount of parts out of this, but it wasn't a very photogenic disassembly, so I didn't take many 'during' pictures of the process.

A view from under the hood, unfortuneately somewhat obscured by the glare of the metal strip in there. One of these days, I'm finally going to justify building some sort of diffuser for my overhead light.

The naked printer, without all the plastic panels. And I seem to recall some of the plastic not wanting to come off.

This is the standard wall of gears in pretty much every printer I've taken apart. The twist here is that it's covered up with a metal panel, which I could not for the life of me get all the way off. So while I managed to retrieve the bulk of the gears, there were a few that got away.

The chassis of the printer, just about stripped of salvageable parts.

There were quite a few parts that came out of this, as I mentioned earlier, so I split the pile into two photo groups. It's always nice when I'm forced to do that.

Hewlett-Packard ScanJet 6200c

This will be a short post. It's a scanner, so the whole disassembly process took 20 minutes at most. Plus, there's not many parts in the average scanner I bother to pull, and this one was probably below average. So, yeah, not much to say.

Here it is in all its box-like, post-functional glory. Also, I feel I should point out that this one was particularly heavy and bulky; if this hadn't been in a pile right outside my apartment building, it would have been a real pain to retrieve.

And here's a shot with the lid up.

Like I said, not many mechanical parts to deal with.

I would be disappointed with this trophy pile if it were not for the fact that I only had to lug the scanner less than a hundred feet to get it home. Low effort, low reward; I guess that's fair.

New Home Memory Craft 7000 sewing machine

For a while, sewing machines were pretty much the only types of appliances I could count on finding when I would go trashpicking. Then about two months ago, the supply dried up. I don't know if the sew/vac place was packing them in the boxes they throw out, or they just didn't throw any of them out, but either way I sort of started to miss taking them apart. As much as I gripe about the lack of good parts in them, or the fact that often they wouldn't come apart to begin with, but there are some odd little parts that only come from sewing machines. That and I just like complaining. I'm sure I'd get sick of printers and VCRs eventually if they were the majority of what I found.

This is one of those sewing machines with the computer controlled stitching, so there were a few buttons to salvage. Not very evident from the angle of this photo is the fact that several of the panels were removed when I found it. I've noticed that the sew/vac place has been cannibalizing what they throw out more than in the past. Some of the skeletonized upright vacs I've seen lately are kind of sad looking. I'm actually glad they've been doing this since what they take and what parts I'm interested in usually don't overlap, and since it's better that those parts go to repair another machine than go into a box where they may or may not ever become part of some dinky little sculpture.

Here's the control panel and its circuitry. I'm not sure why I took this shot since I don't think it depicts any of the parts I saved. Also, I didn't take any pictures of the inner mechanisms because, yeah, it was one of those sewing machines where nothing would come out.

All in all, not the worst parts haul from a sewing machine.