What's In Your Parts Box?

While I may not have as much as some, I may have more than others. Certainly more than "I" thought I'd ever have and desire at the moment to keep. However, there is I believe - a saying which - even if not well known and perhaps not verbatum, "I" live by - "you won't need it until you've thrown it away." Sure enough, often it happens. Ya toss an item in the trash today. A day or so after it's gone, you are in need and you kick yourself for having tossed it.

As for screws, I have about 6 - 3 lb coffee cans full of them. I strip them from ANYTHING I cannibalize - be it electronics, furniture or anything in between. I save all parts I can get off PC boards or out of chassis - in decent condition. The rest - well.... someone else has to have some fun going through the dump!

Way before E-Bay and the internet, I had about 1000 tubes of all sorts that an old TV/Radio repair shop gone out of business - threw away. It took me about 2 weeks of a few hours of sorting. I kept some of the more popular ones then - such as for Tube set TVs which some folks still used, the then still current Tube AM/FM Radios/CBs/Ham. NOW I see people needing many of those I destroyed - for the older tube "Car" radios and such. Yes, I "destroyed" the others by smashing them. My theory is, if "I" can't prosper from it - no one will. About the only thing one "can" prosper from where I don't play, is the scrap metal from any chassis I throw out.

There was "an" occasion or two where I sold some containers of surplus parts and "pulled" parts. I got my price for them. In one instance, I sold about

12 bigger electroylitics at a hamfest. They were pretty hefty but I had no use for them. A woman apparently sent her boy over to buy them from me, to resell (unbeknownst to me). Someone told me about it once they were bought. I said simply - "I" made my profit, who cares???? I got from them what I wanted. God bless her if she got hers. A big part of my collection now, is I've bought out a few businesses, computer shops, etc. I've got boxes of unused parts still not even catagorized. I've got some RS stuff bought in bulk, some of which isn't even sold by them anymore.

I'm working on a web site as I speak, I hope to offer much of it there. I won't do E-Bay as I don't want much for a lot of it and the selling/listing fees wouldn't make it worth my while. I'd have to add it in just to make it work and I don't want to do that. My purpose is to get the parts out as cheap as I can to those in need. Shipping, I can't do much about, except hope they order enough to make it worth "their" while.

Collecting can be fun and meaningful, but as others have witnessed, it can "over take" you.

L.

When I want stuff from a scrap metal skip I usually get to know the people who fill the skip and ask their permission. Here these skips are often provided on a "free skip for scrap metal" basis, so it's no odds to them whether items go in the skip or are taken by me.

Chris

Capacitors...resistors...

Books...NEVER get rid of a book...

Tom

=>....what kinds of electronic and mechanical "trash" is WORTH disassembling and keeping for parts to build other projects?

"Trash?" Never. "Stuffe" and "Junque," maybe, but never the "T" word!

I think I have managed to save about every single bit and piece of anything I have ever owned (I'm 71 now) and have actually used one or two items in other projects. My wife and I built rows of heavy shelves in our basement so we could store treasures for possible use in the future (I had three shelves and she the rest--she's as bad as I). I was lucky to have worked for an electronics company for 20 years and managed to squirrel away mounds of valuable goodies. On several occasions, several cartons of obsolete components would appear in the hallway near the stockroom with a sign reading, "Take all you want, but have it out of the building by 5PM." Oh, the good-ol' days.

I have stripped boards for valuable, i.e., hard-to-find parts, tossing them when they are down to vanilla R and C components. Always save large electrolytics, power transistors, heat sinks, high-wattage resistors, easily removed connectors (bless he who invented the thodderthukker!). Wire is always saved, whatever its configuration, as well as cases, plugs, sockets, relays, etc... ALWAYS save screws!

As for disposing of stuffe and junque, it can be traumatic as most of you know. Tossing that rusty 4-inch encabulator will defintely prompt a project several months from now that requires a 4-inch encabulator. Right?

In this vein, allow me to share a (maybe not so) humorous story. Not too long after getting my ham license, I was fatally bitten by the Teletype bug when a fellow ham and co-worker sold me all his TTY gear, which included spare parts, manuals, and other good stuffe. Wow! The smell of hot oil, the thunderous din, dodging gear teeth as they ricocheted out of the case! Ecstacy! From then on I was hooked, and collected, cataloged, and stored every bit and piece that even vaguely could be used in a TTY application.

Over several years I acquired several more TTY machines, in the end managing to have five running simultaneously on HF and VHF radio circuits! The sound was deafening! But what fun it was to keep them all running. A local radio station surplussed all their paper and tape when they converted from mechanical to glass terminals, and of course I was there with my little LUV truck to help them out!

Moving time came finally and I decided that it was time to cut back a bit. (Actualy, the new house didn't have room for a tenth of our stuffe, let alone all the TTY equipment.) A local ham and I had been conversing for months about TTY and he said he would take all the TTY gear I didn't want. He came over, looked at it, and came back a week or so later with a mid-size U-Haul truck. We loaded it all in and I watched him slowly roll away, the sides of the box bulging as he disappeared arround the corner.

I heard a few months later that he was in divorce procedings! I guess she just couldn't take it!

Moral: Be careful what you toss out. Better yet, build more shelves!

Cheers--

Terry--WB4FXD Edenton, NC

A place where I used to work paid for the annual holiday party with money from recycling the aluminum from hogged-out cases.

Until DCAS heard of it.

Futher about taking from scrap bins. Back in the 30's there was a Co. here in SF that made plumb bobs for K&E. They made them for free. All K&E had to do was supply the brass. Their profit was in the turnings and it was all set up in an orderly production basis. It was send back to the brass supplier as guaranteed content.

Chuck P.

I have some National semiconductor data and applications books here dating from '76 and '80. Gems.

I'm not sure but I think one ( or even two ) may have finally made it *back* into print ! Unaltered in content too.

Graham

A friend who works for a very large engineering firm (who buy maybe

10,000 tons of steel a day) told me they pay less than the regular scrap value for it. Don't know if this is true or not?

Chris

What I threw that I kicked myself for was a Cibiko.

My wife is a bigger gadget freak than I am and she had insisted on getting one when they came out. Since she didn't have anyone else around with one she never got to use its primary feature (wireless chat) and the rest of its game features were fairly lame so it soon ended up in a box in the crap - er I mean craft - room.

We were sorting stuff in the room when we were getting ready to move and decided to toss it. One month later there was an article in Servo explaining how to use a Cibiko as a portable rs232 terminal interface for debugging mobile robots.

ARRG!

Catman

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

Back in the 70s, the place I worked was the #1 recycler and user of recycled paper products. They even designed the three arrow logo that is on all of the recyclable goods you see today. So what did we do with all of our computer printouts? We threw them away.

This was back in 80 column punch card days. That card stock is made from virgin paper fibres, and is very valuable to recyclers. S one of our operators would save all the card batches, collect a few months of them, drive downtown, load up his car, and take it all to one of our recycling centers. He too used the money for parties that he invited everyone inthe office to.

Bob Kaplow NAR # 18L TRA # "Impeach the TRA BoD" >>> To reply, remove the TRABoD!

The pump is good, though tired

Gunner

"Considering the events of recent years, the world has a long way to go to regain its credibility and reputation with the US." unknown

Pretty much anything, for suitable values of "project". IOW it depends what you like to build.

That pile of lumber. I don't have a fireplace any more...

An assortment of synthetic laser crystal castoffs (impurity levels off just enough to make them useless for that application, but still pretty).

Let the record show that Gunner wrote back on Sun,

26 Jun 2005 06:48:42 GMT in rec.crafts.metalworking :

It is interesting how equipment which is too worn for commercial use is still good for home use. Knife makers in the Portland area used to snagg the "used" belts from back of the Gerber plant, because what the Gerber workers considered "shot", they considered, "a little worn".

tschus pyotr

--
pyotr filipivich.
as an explaination for the decline in the US\'s tech edge, James 
Niccol wrote "It used to be that the USA was pretty good at 
producing stuff teenaged boys could lose a finger or two playing with."

Good for you. Get that tuition back any way you can.

Well, since you also asked for experiences...

When I was in college I found the EE dept was cleaning out a lab and had scrapped a machine for scoring IC chips. Probably from the 60's or early

70's. The machine was mounted on a plate metal base about 1/2 inch thick and about 30 inches by 18 inches. Mounted on it were various various motors, steppers, slides, a vacuum table etc. I grabbed it and stored it in a friends garage.

A couple of years later, I was still in school and working for another department at the University. A researcher there told me they needed a stepper controlled slide. I went back to that old machine and unbolted the perfect motor/slide combination. Sold it back to the University for $100!

Name and University withheld to protect the guilty...

"Dave" ha scritto nel messaggio news:RAmze.398948$ snipped-for-privacy@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...

I didn't trash nothing anymore.

I.

Hmm... Being a packrat for my entire life......... (Yes, hundreds and hundreds of electronic things....) Not worth it... out it all goes, except for the the stuff I will use in retirement... 4CX10000B's, huge capacitors, inductors, tower equipment, vacuum variables, etc. Most of what I save for the future will never materialize into an end product.... I am a realist.

Hmm... Being a packrat for my entire life......... (Yes, hundreds and hundreds of electronic things....) Not worth it... out it all goes, except for the the stuff I will use in retirement... 4CX10000B's, huge capacitors, inductors, tower equipment, vacuum variables, etc. Most of what I save for the future will never materialize into an end product.... I am a realist.