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.

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.

Apple 5.25" and 3.5" disk drives

I could have also titled this entry 'Sackful of Disappointment,' but I'll get to that in a minute.

There was a time, ten or so years ago, when I was excited by computers, rather than just ambivalent like I do now. Part of that excitement was just the sheer novelty of the personal computer. My generation is the last one to not grow up with home computers from a very early age. Yes, a lot of kids back then had access to computers, but many more didn't; computers were not nearly as ubiquitous as they started to become in the early to mid Nineties. So when I started 5th grade at a school with a computer class, it was my first real experience with them. The computers they had were Apple IIe models, which even at the time were getting close to obsolescence, but they were good enough for middle-schoolers to learn on.

The point is that I cut my computer-using teeth on those old Apples. So when I saw these diskdrives in a pile of junked computer parts, there was a bit of nostalgia mixed with the regular joy of finding something new to take apart. I grabbed one drive on my way back to the apartment, then found a sturdy shopping bag and headed back to get the other ones. I know from experience that disk drives aren't the most fun disassemblies ever, or have the best parts, but they're usually decent. I figured I could get a couple of blog entries out of this haul. Then I tried to take them apart.

I started with the 5.25" drives. They had dirt on them as well as in them. The little droplets on them are from where I cleaned them up a little.

Dig the retro Apple logo on the circuit board. That's as far as I went on the first one, and didn't even bother with the second one. It was a combination of screws that wouldn't come off and nothing worth saving out of it. But all was not lost: I still had the two 3.5" drives. Surely those would hav some good pieces.

Here they are. Just as dirty on the outside, but not so much on the inside.

And that's as I could go on these. Those metal housings didn't want to come off. So that's the end of that.

I did keep the plastic cases for the 3.5" drives, and that's it. The official reason I kept them is that they could be useful as project boxes. Off the record...I kept them out of spite.

Epson Stylus Photo 820 printer

Ah, heavy trash day. That special time of the month where people can throw away those big items that the regular garbage collectors would just leave on the curb. And more importantly, it's a time where the poor and/or frugal among us can nab some free goodies. I'm not ashamed to say I've partially furnished several apartments with furniture and repaired several bicycles with parts intercepted on their way to the landfill. And so, around every heavy trash day, I cruise the area and take mental notes of what's in the junkpiles. I have a standing 'want list,' including metal shelving, a better desk, bike parts, and, of course, dead electronics. Sometimes, I get lucky and I find several items worth scavenging (and small enough that I can take them back to the apartment). Other times, the pickings are slimmer.

This was one of those months. The printer in this entry was the only thing I found that was worth grabbing. Well, there was this other giant printer/fax, but I couldn't get it back to my place. However, I'll save any 'one that got away' rants for another day.

This was a dirty printer. You can see the filth covering it in the picture, but it doesn't really convey the full experience. That's not just dirt or dust on there, it's dirt held on by something sticky. It's like whoever owned this dunked it in soda, then didn't really make much of an effort to wash it off afterward. That may be a bad analogy since this was a different, more subtle stickiness. Whatever it was, I made damned sure to wash my hands thoroughly after I was done dissecting it.

The inside of the printer was much cleaner, though not really any more photogenic (though it would have helped if I had kept the camera steady). Standard inkjet innards.

And here are those innards, all layed out on the floor. Not bad on average, but I usually get more parts out of a printer.