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.

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.