I’m not proud. When many of us were kids, we were unabashedly excited when trash day came around because sometimes you’d find an old radio or — jackpot — an old TV out by the curb. Then, depending on its size, you rescued it, or you had your friends help, or, in extreme cases, you had to ask your dad. In those days, people were frugal, so the chances of what you found being fixable were slim to none. If it was worth fixing, the people would have probably fixed it.
While TVs and radios were the favorites, you might have found other old stuff, but in those days, no one was throwing out a computer (at least not in a neighborhood), and white goods like refrigerators and washing machines had very little electronics. Maybe a mechanical timer or a relay, but that’s about it.
Didn’t matter. Even a refrigerator had a power cord. Just about anything was fair game for collection in a budding junk box for a future, unspecified project. But today, unrepairable trash is likely to stay on the curb until it heads for the landfill.
Why?
This shouldn’t be a surprise. Even though people are more likely to throw away nearly good stuff these days, a lot has changed. Consumer electronics have tiny SMD components, and a lot of the cool stuff will be custom and inscrutable to an electronics hobbyist.
But some of it is just supply and demand. In 1970, if you needed, say, a relay, and you didn’t live in a major city, you’d have to find what you wanted in a catalog. Then you’d place an order with a written check or a money order. Don’t forget, in those days, there was probably a steep minimum order, too. So one $3 relay wasn’t going to cost $3. It would probably have to be part of a minimum order and cost more in shipping. While a $100 minimum sounds big, in the 1970s, for most of us, it might as well have been $100,000.
Then the check had to clear, and two or three weeks later, the postman might bring your relay. After a month or more, you might not even remember why you wanted it. Today, you click a few buttons, and sometimes the next day the component mysteriously appears on your doorstep.
How About You?
Do you still strip old components? I’ll admit, it has only been a few years since I stopped habitually cutting power cords off anything heading for the trash. I finally threw out or donated old computer cases, small monitors, and the like.
Computers becoming junk made things a little more complicated. Before 3D printers, getting your hands on things like stepper motors, bearings, and belts was a little challenging. But now, these are a click away like everything else.
If I do strip any components today, it might be strange things that are hard to find now: air variable capacitors, inductors, and maybe floppy drives. Unless, of course, the gear is super old, but in general, things that are real antiques tend not to show up in the trash heap.
On the other hand, people are more likely to throw away perfectly good gear these days. Well, perfectly good if you have even moderate repair skills. We’ve picked up laser printers, TVs, and a very nice pro audio mixing board just by paying attention to the dumpster in the parking lot. As I said, I’m not proud.
Your Turn
Do you collect junk parts? Why? Why not? Do you think kids should even bother now? Do they? What’s your dream dumpster find? We sometimes get jealous of people who, apparently, have better dumpsters than we do.
I remember when my neighbor put a clothes drier at the curb. I thought the control panel was going to be full of cool stuff, but it was just a few switches and an electro-mechanical timer (that didn’t work anymore).
I did once find a microwave on the curb. I biked over there with a screwdriver and ended up salvaging the micro-switches from the door, and the controller PCB. I never did anything with the PCB, but many years later the micro-switches proved useful when our microwave “died” at a very inopportune time.
Microwave transformers are the most useful part. You can rewind them to make a high current power supply. If you collect a few, you can build a spot welder.
Microwave transformers are a bit odd. They’re designed to run at full power so it’s not as simple as just rewinding the secondary.
Spot welder yes, power supply transformer no so much.
Here in Italy the local community dump collects containers of electronic and domestic stuff. Much is easily repairable. Broken switch, cable, or fuse. Unfortunately it is forbidden to take anything. Most is shipped off to Africa. Drives me nuts. Recently the city has been requiring people to register with ID, Fiscal number, and list what is being disposed. A hassle and risk because I used to help people for free bring stuff to the dump but not anymore. I risk being accused of operating an illegal service because they would have a list of everything I bring. 3 fridges? Three ovens? I must be doing black work! Absurd. As a result people are abandoning stuff on the streets and occasionally I find cool stuff.
No telling what “cool stuff” future bioengineers will find.
Computer “repair” shops are bad with throwing out stuff. I got 3 2023 laptops last week that required minimal work. Grabbed 8 more older PCs and donated them to a Christian tech center so they could repurpose for the needy. Ewaste is a big problem in wealthier neighborhoods.
I get a good number of computers from Goodwill. They seem to have partnered with tech training organisations to employ people to go over batches of donated laptops (from recycling businesses, I suspect) and use bad ones to repair good ones, then sell them for very reasonable cost. Obv, this only works if you can get lots of the same type, but schools and businesses do tend to buy and dispose of batches of similar models. I’ve been quite satisfied with what I’ve got second hand.
Sadly I have greatly started to prune back my collection of miscellaneous components and salvaged equipment because I have just never found that I was able to use anything for “the next project”.
There were some switches and power cords sure, but the vast majority just took up space in bins and boxes and my dwindling free time has shifted my interests to more specific things where most salvaged stuff just isn’t useful.
Unless it has a cool display. My god I have so many generic LCD displays, weird VFDs on breakout boards, 5×7 matrix led display modules for a clock or four at one day in the far future….
Exactly this. I’m now old enough to ask “will I get to this before I die?”
Same here :-(
I was probably old enough years ago, but am only starting to ask myself that question now.
We are there too. We often go to the store now, and just pick up what we ‘need’. The house is slowly being de-cluttered. Gave away lots of r/c magazines and gun magazines/digests the other day as I realized I’d never ‘get back to them’… So why have ’em taking up all that shelf space? Same with old computer stuff. Never use it, so either deep six, give away, or recycle depending. There comes a time!
No, I’ve never have picked up ‘curb’ stuff. Closed I got was places like thrift store/good will/garage sales….
I live in a college town so every summer when the longer leases end, there’s a ton of good stuff on the curb. Most of it isn’t even broken. Vexingly, some jerks do cut the cords off of kitchen appliances before throwing them away. But even the ‘broken’ stuff that they throw out throughout the year, a lot of it is trivially repairable. Repairability isn’t over.
I still don’t bother, usually, because i already have everything. Like, when the microwave died, we bought a new microwave for $50 (!!!) right away. So by the time july rolled around and we were passing free ones on the street, we didn’t want one anymore. The same with the TV. We have a 32″ TV and we see larger TVs for free all the time but i just don’t want a bigger TV at all, certainly not bad enough to drag it home and find out if it turns on. But i’m sure a lot of these do turn on. Our dining room table came from the curb 13 years ago, and since then we just pass by tables because we still have that one.
When i throw stuff away, i strip things that seem valuable to me. I do keep just about every machine screw that passes through my hands. I keep wall warts and USB cables, even though i already have a pile of them. When i reach into the box and think “is this dumb project worth wasting my one fancy wall wart on,” it feels very different now that i have too many than it did back when i would be lucky to find one with about the right voltage.
But a lot of things, i just know i’ll never use it, i throw it away. A lot of times i strip something down just so that i can separate the bulky plastic box (municipal waste) from the weighty metal components (scrap yard). A cool thing there is, at least once a week some redneck with a pick up truck comes through my neighborhood looking for scrap metal people leave on the curb. So on that front, i’m a donor not just a recipient. I’d rather the convenience of curbside collection than make a special trip to get $5.
I lived in a college town of a big university for 20 years, and dumpster diving was great. The international students would leave after their 4 years and throw EVERYTHING out. Got plenty of lightly used furniture and home goods, a really nice Fluke multimeter, a Garmin GPS unit with box/mount/car cable (this was before everyone had smartphones), and plenty of TVs, including some really nice CRTs that I would pass along to my retro gaming friends.
Just a note about the “jerks”: if some kid comes around and manages to find a portable electrical source somewhere and gets electrocuted plugging in your discarded appliance, there might be liability issues and maybe that varies state to state, or idk maybe that was long ago and laws have been updated, I’m not a lawyer! But, there’s a seriously good basis for cutting those cords, and if you’re really actually knowledgeable, it should be easy to replace.
That’s hogwash. There’s no duty of care for discarded electrical appliances. There’s no implied endorsement of safety or suitability when you put something in the trashcan.
And anyways, yeah, it is easy to replace the cord. For me. But the kid who actually wants a free dorm fridge specifically is not me.
Sometimes curb shopping is unnecessary.
I bought a nightlight for $5 at Walmart; it has a PIR motion sensor, 3-32 volt leds in series, an ambient light detector photodiode, a LDO 3.3 volt regulator, an 8.2 volt zener and a microcontroller I can’t identify, plus a bunch of SMD resistors, a 1/2watt fusible resistor, and a full wave bridge rectifier. All for $5.
Lots of cool parts. Now I need a microscope to see them all.
What the heck is a 32 volt LED?
Nightlight with a tanning capability.
That’s pretty bright eh?
A 32-volt LED is really just ten LEDs in a series string, and often several parallel strings. Seen in LED ‘filament’ elements and COB modules.
Makes integrating line-powered LEDs easier: You don’t need a transformer or large ratio buck. The cheapest ones just use a resistor-fuse and/or a capacitor for current limiting.
For simple things like switches and this and that (wire) US has dollar stores (where some things sell for less than $5 per) or Five Below.
I used to strip components from any electronic board I came across. I spent countless hours of my student years de-soldering and sorting components into drawers.
Occasionally I would get a bag of box of mixed components from a assembly house I was in touch with.
Getting to work old second hand computers with obscure and obsolete hardrive bus technologies also kept me busy.
Somehow I also got hold of a box of massive heatsinks, and 20 years later haven’t used any of them yet.
These days I often look into the e-waste bin in my office building. For a period there was an IT company in the building, and it was a bonanza of any IT device one ever needed, everything in perfect working order albeit being 5-10 years old.
I had to slow down picking up stuff due to space, and keep only what I need, plus these days the selection is quite slim.
Pull the RAM because even router makers are suffering the pinch.
Placing electronics on the curb is illegal here and you can get fined. Electronics aren’t allowed to be placed in your trash container either (you can get a fine) so you have to take it to the municipal’s waste site. If you are lucky and the device works you might be able to give it away through facebook or something. So yeah, dumpster diving isn’t a possibility where I live.
I’m doing the exact opposite. I’m trying to get rid of as much stuff as possible. I keep going from room to room to clear things and hopefully in a year or so I’ll have a clean and lean house. I try to collect at least 10 filled up trash bags a week. I hope to get permission to move to the US so the more I can get rid of now the better it is.
My favorite, not a real dumpster story but still. Many moons ago i just started working at a new company and the manager asked me to go to the IT storage room and throw away everything in there. He had hired a company to deliver containers for it and everything needed to go. Old servers, spare parts for servers, tons of stuff. There was one thing I couldn’t throw away and that was a box, still sealed, with a new old stock IBM Model M. I used that keyboard for many years. I still miss the keyboard but parts sadly broke as the plastic became too fragile and one day it fell and several key caps broke, the casing broke, it was a very sad day. I miss that keyboard.
I will never get rid of the 5 moving boxes with random cables. They are all nicely tied up with velcro.
RIP your Model M.
Can you share where “here” is? I think it’s actually sensible to prohibit electronics dumping, but… I used to look for computers on the sidewalks near Cambridge MA in 90s. People threw old 8-bit micros out when they bought a new Window95 computer, including PCs running DOS perfectly. When I was divorced my ex threw out a bunch of stuff, including a Model M (had a “terminal” rather than PS/2 connector), so I didn’t think worth rescuing.)
When living in the Netherlands, I came across a washing machine on the side of the road. Every Tuesday it was allowed to place stuff on the street for collection by the city. Lo and behold the washing machine was exactly like the one I had at home but the buttons on mine were broken. I promptly stopped and began to remove the control panel to recover the buttons. As I was busy two environmental police showed up and asked what I was doing. I explained I needed the parts. They responded by saying I wasn’t allowed to remove parts. Take the entire machine or leave it. I said OK, and loaded the machine into my van. Inside the van I continued removing the control panel. By then the police had left so I removed the machine and placed it again on the curb!
I just LOVE that story … my favorite comment so far! You, sir, would fit in quite well with the hacker ethos in the U.S.! Well done!
I got lucky in the mid 1990s of benefitting from someone with interests similar to mine being told by his landlord that his hoard of electronics had to go. This accounts for some very interesting digital equipment from the early to mid 1970s. I also lived in Charlottesville, VA in 1998, when the University of Virginia was throwing out some amazing stuff. I’ve since divested of all the i386-based IBM microchannel stuff I collected, but I still have a great collection of ISA cards for things like esoteric multiprocessing. (But not even ChatGPT can help me figure out what to do with an nCube.)
I own a laser cutter, a big console one.
Little known fact: once you own a laser cutter, everything looks like stock.
I’ll take anything and everything I see on the side of the road, all it has to be is flat and made of plastic, especially of a type/form I don’t already have. I’ve got “sample selections” of all sorts of things, foam, structural, decorative… you name it.
I just this year added a storage shed to my property just to house all the stock.
Ordering stuff was not that slow.
I remember ordering from Jameco. Exactly one week later a brown truck would deliver a package. Sometimes just after I stepped off of the bus from school.
I figure one week to get to California and back to Albuquerque was pretty good. Of course I also did some curb shopping, but I had good curbs. The Air Force Weapons Lab and Sandia Labs.
Sandia Labs had a salvage yard that was open to the general public a couple times a month. The most highly sought after items were the 3 pound bags of electronic parts, new, for $1.50. Even in 1978 that was a good deal.
It was when I was a kid. Mail-order companies usually had “Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery” in their catalogs. Just the way it was. In retrospect, I guess they let packages pile up until it made sense to call for a pickup.
I admit that every time I go to bring some trash to our trash collection point, I secretly dive into the container where old electronics is collected to see if there is anything worth salvaging. If there is a 70’s/80’s computer, I will try to take it with me. If there is a more or less decent laptop with a large screen, I will try to take it with me. Anything Apple, I will try to take with me. And any loose electronics as well.
The 70’/s80’s computers, I will try to fix, play around with and sell if I’m done with them. It’s only to fulfill my curiosity of finally having a computer that I wanted but couldn’t afford at the time.
If the laptop is anywhere decent, I will probably give it a place as a home server. Nice and quiet things, and I won’t have to search for a keyboard and screen if I need to access it. Although I always put VNC on it.
Anything Apple is interesting because it’s always high-end and even 15-year old Apple computers run Linux extremely well (and if they are x86, they will run Windows well too).
And the loose electronics is all about the connectors and sockets, and eeproms, cplds, gals, fpgas and rams. Basically any programmable logic (which in my view includes ram). You can just never have enough connectors and sockets, too often did I need one and had to either buy expensive ones from a local source or wait weeks for cheap ones from a Chinese source. And programmable logic the same thing. They are just too useful, and generally expensive if you need to buy them.
Where I live, people almost never set their old stuff on the curb, sadly. They all bring it to the trash collection point. And once they bring it there, they basically pass responsibility and ownership to the trash collection company. So anything I take away is technically stealing and illegal. But I still do it because often it’s such a waste and I can still make use of it.
Of course I simply bring back anything that I took when it has no longer any use for me. I’m not a hoarder and can let go of stuff quite easily. :)
Another story. My dad used to work for Philips. And Philips had something that they called the ABR: “Afdeling Bruikbare Restmaterialen”, “Department of Useful Waste materials”.
So, departments that were doing R&D always had old electronics left after a project. And it would pile up in the cupboards. So once in a while they would clear out the cupboards of old stuff and bring it to the ABR. The ABR would then sell it to employees (or their family) for a nominal price.
This way I once (some 30 years ago) was able to buy a perfectly working 100MHZ dual-channel Philips Oscilloscope for 25 guilders (probably 50 dollars in current money), and a hundred or so SMD ICs from the 74HC/HCT and 74AC/ACT series for 5 guilders (10 dollars) . The oscilloscope sadly died 2 years ago, but every now and then the bag of SMD ICs comes in handy. I actually also got bags and bags of normal DIP 74L/S/LS/F series of ICs, old ram ICs, eproms, uarts, Z80 series chips, etc. etc. from there, all for cents a piece. They always come in handy when I want to repair an old computer, and they don’t take up much space.
Philips basically sponsored my interest in computer electronics. :)
I have some regrets too. I’m sure they had DEC VT-220 and VT-340 terminals there, and also for sure HP 2645 terminals. I should have gotten one. I still love the looks of the HP2645 terminals!
The company where I worked would occassionally sell off its “old” computer equipment to employees through a silent bidding system. I knew one guy who in the late 90’s bought a working Sun Workstation for $25 and promptly sold it on eBay for $400. :-)
+100 for the connectors. Sometimes it is much easier to search through a box of salvaged cables/connectors than to find what exactly that specific connector you need at a saturday afternoon is called.
And sometimes, you simply cannot find them easily.
I’ve acquired a few lithium ion batteries for projects from discarded vapes but I’m always surprised how easy it is to find junk that can easily be turned into basic lock picking tools on most urban streets.
University skips were the best. I once scored a huge mass spectrometer that could only just, with lots of effort, be manoeuvred onto the back seat of my friends austin mini.
Here is a lesson I learned when I started pruning my junk collection:
Never, never, never throw away the last of anything. I hate buying something I thought I would never again need and trashed/donated/recycled.
My superpower is being able to hold onto old parts or gear for a decade, then desperately need them exactly 24 hours after I finally throw them out.
A neighbor of mine found a restaurant serving robot cast off on a curbside. Brought it home, found documentation on the web, bought a new battery and had it trained and running on his garage in less than a week. Next Halloween, it will be delivering trick or treats to the neighborhood kids!
Yes…after 40 years of doing electronics, I still have an active junk box. The neighbours know to bring their “stuff” to me before dumping it. If it cannot be fixed, I’ll remove the PCBs…transformers…motors…etc, and “hoard” it. Even the SMD stuff like old laptops…I often find difficult to procure components there for other repairs.
I love e-waste. However I’m in one of the countries where it’s illegal to take (even though they only pretend to care at all at the recycling centers) and now they ruled that curbside e-waste will no longer be collected (read: nobody’s gonna throw out anything anymore).
Sigh. In my youth, it was still legal, even at e-waste centers, which I visited often, much to the dismay of my mum. I took any old computer off the curb, any interesting VCR, sometimes TVs. HiFi stuff. Sometimes I would salvage stuff for parts I thought might come in handy in the future. I’ve got a well stacked junk bin.
I’ve thrown so much awesome stuff out, but, as I said, my mum hates it when I drag in something -new- old, and I didn’t know what would eventually turn out as possibly-a-prototype, or at least crazy rare or at least crazy sought after nowadays. Guilty of throwing a few of these away. (I did keep a Commodore PC40-III and it still works and it’s one of my favorite retro computers)
And miraculously I still pull antique equipment out of e-waste containers (the public ones are unguarded and even if police comes by, they usually turn a blind eye). Like how about a VIC-20 around 5 years ago? Or a Rockwell AIM-65 just a month earlier? Or how about a 1964 solid state electronic calculator (16 digit Nixie) on the curb 2 years ago? Very early 70s oscilloscope. Very early 80s DSO (all 8k 8bit sample RAM, runs on an 8085).
A friend pulled a 1965 solid state 19 inch B&W Philips TV (read that again. Solid State. All Transistor. In 1965. With a 19 inch tube!) which I recently fixed.
People still don’t know what they’re throwing away.
Not that I built much with the junk (that did change in the last decade, some of that stuff had articles written here), but then and now I try to get as much of it working – and the stuff I salvaged comes in handy as spare parts to fix the other junk.
Another crazy story – back when I had time and retro computing museums weren’t invented yet, there was a “modern” (late 90s CRT) TV sitting on the curb next door to next door.
Out of boredom I took it home and fixed it and brought it back to the curb. (too new and too big)
Twist at the end of the story: There was someone in the courtyard and I asked him if that’s his TV. He said yes, the kids threw it off while playing (the flyback had the PCB cracked so I could guess it was dropped) and it broke (duh). I told him I fixed it – and he took it right back inside.
Back in the lean years (money and weight), I did a fair amount of cost avoidance by picking up appliances that had been deemed “unfixable” by repair people (who also happened to be employed by new appliance sellers). We had a mismatched white dryer and almond washing machine for about 7 or 8 years: free “unfixable” stuff. The dryer needed a bearing. The washer needed some judicious application of a grinding bit and JB Weld to pot the stamped main drive pulley back together.
Many IC’s and other components were salvaged from VCR’s, old computers, appliances, whatnot which have been used to repair early solid state pinball machines, bronze age video games, video game consoles, and who knows what else.
My habit started as a kid. We were not exactly rich, so if I didn’t scrounge, I didn’t have. If I didn’t build, I did without. I tore apart a lot of free, broken lawn mowers before I finally was able to repair them and put them back together. Made a few bucks selling those at a flea market. Growing up in rural America afforded opportunities to accumulate such things.
I was probably one of the few 12 year olds with 8 TV’s in his bedroom in the 1970’s. (I have even more than that now, thanks to hoarding and repairing defective LCD TV’s from work. You can fit a lot more of those in a room than you can 25″ CRT console TV’s) Admittedly, I am happy to no longer have a pile of vacuum tubes laying around.
My wife is not a fan of my component hoarding most of the time. Exceptions include the time her sewing machine pedal quit working, and I scrounged an oddball/unobtanium microswitch from somewhere in the depths of the stash and had the machine going again in less than an hour.
I’m slowly culling the hoard. I have filled up the allotted space. Now that I’m old and have two nickels to rub together, I have vehicle projects that need that space.
A recently acquired nasty habit of 3D printing is trying to take over some of my video game collection space, so I may have to sell off some of that classic gaming gear. Within the span of a few months, I went from zero to three printers. The filament is piling up, literally. But, as a creative outlet, 3D printing is worth the space.
So, I guess I am salvaging fewer pieces and parts than I used to. But, I’m doing different kinds of repairs now with my new piles of “stuff”. If anyone says you can’t fix the squeezy clamp on an IKEA LED clip-on light, tell them that me and my 3D printer beg to differ. :-)
Heh just to defend the appliance repairman who threw out the dryer with a bad bearing… Something like 70% of broken dryers that come in just need a new belt. Maybe 25% of them need a replacement heating element. There’s so much benefit from just the top set of repairs that i understand why they would toss anything that needs a new motor / bearing / timer / etc. If they can get a 95% repair rate with just two easy procedures, it’s rational not to learn the long tail.
A drive pulley replacement isn’t really anything to learn, just not worth it when you’ll only be able to do a bodged job that might fail quickly or very expensively buy/machine a new one – if the part is available at a good price or from another more terminal donor machine it’ll be done but otherwise…
We all are probably happy with the JBweld/nut’n’bolt/half arsed amateur arc welding that is all most of us can (or would bother) to do quality level of fix for ourselves. Knowing that it might well fail, or put the pulley out of balance enough the machine rattles itself to a real death quicker doesn’t matter to us as “hey got an extra [Insert time period we hope it lasts] as a minimum for free”. But doing it for a customer who then has it fail on them is just bad for your business.
Ah, trash night. In France, they call it “La Nuit des Poubelles.” In Germany, it’s “Krappenfest.
Actually, maybe another story. When I was in University (or Higher Technical School) in The Netherlands, we had the phenomenon of the “HCC Dagen”, “Hobby Computer Club Days”. That was a fair of 3 days, split in 3 sections. One section where IT companies could exhibit their newest stuff, one section where the Hobby Computer Club people could exhibit the stuff they were hobbying with, and one section where companies sold computer stuff: new things for bulk prices, but also magazine clearances: mostly old or new-but-broken stuff for dump prices.
And every year I went there to buy a lot of old new-but-broken stuff to build a new computer for myself. This way I upgraded from an old 8088 XT all the way through 386SX, 386DX, 486, Pentium, in some 6 years time. And all for budget prices. I had to repair some stuff, but seriously: most of it was just bad soldering by the manufacturer and could be fixed with a loupe and a soldering iron within half an hour. At a time where a 286 8MHz cost $2000, I had bought an original IBM mainboard with a 286 6MHz but a defective NVRAM/Clock chip for maybe $25, matching ram for $50, a bunch of videocards, harddisk controllers., I/O cards and such. At home I fixed most of it, kept what I needed for my AT286 (and upgraded to 8MHZ), and sold the rest of what I repaired to classmates and actually had my computer for free AND made some pocket moment on the side. It became a yearly ritual to upgrade my computer and make extra pocket money. :)
That lasted until the HCC Dagen stopped, unfortunately. The PC boom was over, they stopped on a high.
So, not so much curb shopping. But you could see the HCC Dagen as a giant curb where lots of companies were able to make a little extra buck on stuff that they would set on the curb anyway. And have fun along the way, because fun it was! Exhausting, for everyone, but fun!
I miss those days of the HCC as well…
Especially the old junk, finding from time to time some really nice stuff…
I have been inspired by “DIY Perks” Youtube in repurposing old TVs as lights. But I do need to stop picking them up! (My wife is not to happy with all the stuff I’ve collected).
Here is a post of the main success as a really great light in our kitchen. My wife does love this one!
http://www.sadarc.org/xenforo/upload/index.php?threads/old-tv-as-work-light.425/#post-3350
Al – you have a real knack for finding topics that connect to the readers and elicit great engagement. This story is yet another wonderful example. Reading every single comment brought back fond memories and made me think “these are my people”. :-)
Where I live, there’s not so much electronic equipment seen at the curb, BUT the Goodwill store near the nicer parts of town do get some interesting donations. I’ve picked up old computers, GPS units, loads of VCR’s & DVD players with various parts that can be reused, AND lots of discarded electronic toys. That last one is my weakness. When I got into electronics, I couldn’t resist buying a Force Feedback Wheel or a plastic pig that had a shaking motor with LED’s and sound circuits or any number of other toys with fantastic, reusable parts. I eventually collected so many discarded toys with great that I had to cull my collection recently … of course, I took the extras back to the same Goodwill.
One story I’m proud of: a lady in a neighborhood a few miles from me asked online if someone could come look at her garage door and opener. Her door would open on its own multiple times per day with no input and it concerned her for obvious safety reason. I volunteered my technical services for free and one by one eliminated all potential causes (including ‘do you have any enterprising technical teenagers living within a few houses?’). Well, ultimately, I noticed that a single tactile switch on her opener keypad didn’t make that satisfying “click” sound when pressed. I took the keypad home, desoldered that switch, and replaced it with one I’d scavenged from the aforementioned non-functional Microsoft Force Feedback steering wheel’s main circuit board. The new switch worked great and proved to be the cause of her issues! No more ghostly garage door openings in the middle of the night. And the most satisfying thing was that this saved her from being the victim of any unscrupulous repairmen who might have easkukt convinced her to do a whole new opener for many hundreds of $$’s. It also gave me great satisfaction that a lowly, scavenged tactile switch from my precious parts bin found a new lease on life and is providing value once again.
A lot of my best parts come from junk! I’ve been scavenging mechanical, optical, and electrical gizmos for decades. From spectrometers to printers.
Why? Because it’s free and saves a ton of money if you know what to look for.
Why not? Because you might have multiple draws of weird junk that will never get used
I always salvage parts from trash. Switches, relays, capacitors, connectors, cords and power supplies are always useful. Nichrome wire from heating elements can be used to make custom power resistors. Even if the PCB is all surface mount, I will still desolder things like power transistors, inductors and any ICs I recognize from it.
Some of the parts have been sitting in my bins for decades. I know if I throw any of it away that I will soon need that part and have to buy a new one though.
50 years ago I was dumpster diving an Ollivetti agency. Lots of older diode transistor logic.
For components these days no – without SMD rework setup its not even worth considering the components on my own failed devices as a rule (though if I ever get the electronics space set up the way I want that might change), but with reasonable odds any device tossed out by the departing students actually works…
Old TVs had 3.579 MHz color-burst crystals (recently discussed on HAD). Guys were known to stop their cars (often with family members aboard) to extract the crystals from these TVs. These crystals eventually became part of 80 meter CW transmitters, with the users sometimes becoming members of the CBLA (Color Burst Liberation Army) See: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search?q=CBLA
I once built a power supply for a Heathkit HW-32A 20 meter SSB transceiver from parts “curb shopped” from discarded TV sets: https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-beginning-of-my-radio-life.html