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.

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.

Umax Astra 1200S scanner

This is only the second scanner I've ever scrapped. I got both of them at the same time, but I took the other one apart a few months ago. I saved this one because I was hoping it might still work, and that it was only being trashed because it was obsolete. I don't have any pressing need for a scanner, but it's one of those 'rather have it and not need it' kind of peripherals. And even if it was a few years old, it was free.

Turns out it didn't work, so I released it back into the waste stream. But not before I derived a little entertainment from it.

It's essentially a hollow box with a few other pieces inside. The thing about scanners is that there's not much to them mechanically; all the impressive stuff is electronic, and I don't know enough to know which of those components are still good, nor what I would do with them if I kept them. Steel and plastic, wheels and springs, I understand that stuff, more or less. Electronics are still basically voodoo to me.

Sometimes, even knowing basically what's inside something, there's still an element of surprise. Interestingly shaped pieces or unusual configurations, things like that. That's why I still bother with dead computer keyboards, despite the fact that they all work the same way. Unfortunately, this scanner didn't really have anything like that. The last scanner I scrapped had a cool pulley system to move the optical parts, complete with a length of very thin braided steel cable. This scanner had a much simpler system.

What this one did have that the other one lacked was what is essentially a very long spring that protected the wiring.

The spring is the thing bent at a right angle in the above picture. I have no idea what I can use it for on a practical level, but it's fun to play with.

Oh, and I pulled some other crap too, but the spring is definitely the star of this show.