Holy crap, he does exactly what I do with old electronics!

The resistor is a fuse resistor + diode, printers usually have a counter inside that counts how many pages have been printed or how many times the roller/fuser has turned and when it reaches the limit set by the manufacturer e.g. 10,000 pages the printer over currents the fuse resistor burning it out and now printer will refuse to print. it will usually give you a message in your PC saying maintenance needed bla bla bla replace XX assembly/part. Toner cartridge also have a chip inside them that is just a coutner- it does not actually track the toner levels so when you hit the limit the chip tells the printer im done... when it is not and it will refuse to print (even if you only printed 1 dot for the 1000 pages and your cartridge is full) .. it also stops you from refilling but you can buy the little chips and fuse resistor on ebay Manufactures really really underestimate the life of the parts so you have to replace them more often. Some people desolder or short out the EEPROM chips on the logic board so that it cant keep track of how many pages have been printed lol The fuse assembly, logic and power boards are actually valuable for if they work, stick on ebay especially the heater/fuser assembly.

I need to do dumpster diving again, used to salvage everything! I got a garage full to back that up!

From what you salvaged on rail assemblies and such, I start to wonder if you would have enough to build a rudimentary 3D printer if you'd combine it with a raspberry or perhaps an arduino.

This guy is Bear Grylls of electronics

For an engineering project my group and I took apart an old inkjet printer. It did not have a full one piece head movement component like the fax but we took out the axle, print head holder and motor. With an Ardunio we built a functional 3 story model elevator. It was pretty cool.

If you can find the datasheet, its worth keeping the drivers with the motors. They will be handy to interface with microntrollers and especially for driving the stepper motors they came with (usually, just need clock and sometimes enable pin). I guess you should keep them and the wiring as a complete "package".

A good Afternoon about every year. I love tear down days.

Awesome haul there. Looks like you've got yourself enough parts to make a laser printer or fax machine or something like that.

Thanks!!! I learned a lot. Coming from a really new guy to this stuff, I always appreciate your explanation of things because you put complex things in plain english. Keep it coming man.

1)save and open the tiny button switches- they have a silver contact. 2)save the oscillators- they are silver, 3) save the ink jet cartridge - the film has gold on it, 4) save the white plug-ins on the circuit boards, the contacts inside are gold plated, 5) take the computer cable, cut the ends off, and remove the gold- plated contacts. 6)save the wires in the ink jet printer and computer cable. i use this small wire for my other radio projects (i just finished changing my old clock radio into a SW/ AM/ FM radio, and used some of the scrap wire from my ink jet printer.)

I believe the weird little steel plate/resistor/diode combo from the laser printer makes contact with the end of the toner drum/roller's axle. At least that's what I remember from a teardown of my own. My guess is it's used to control the charge of the drum, so static doesn't build up and smears toner dust all over your pages or something. Maybe. Honestly, I have no idea, other than that it makes mechanical contact with the toner's metal axle.

Damned intern! I was wondering where the hell my fax machine disappeared to!

This is a series that needs to make a come back! Cheers.

I use the precision ground rod, that the ink cartridge carrier travels on, to set the tail stock on my small lathe. Set is between centers and you have a good point for your indicator to reference. Sorry, I know it is not electronics but many of us have more than one hobby. BTW a purpose made rod for setting your tail stock can run well over $100. Just a thought.

Do you ever make things with the stuff you salvage?

Wow you move fast when you take things apart! :) Love your Blog Dave!

27:16 "speedy exit from the dumpster" i know this feeling well. eNinja with his trusty multitool, mini torques set of security, and crowbar of justice; nothing can stop him from his stealthy getaway from the dumpster of usefulness!

I'm sure others must have aalready said. But printers in particular are very useful in the building of "roll your own" 3D printer projects. They have many many useful parts/assembly's.

You can salvage the RAM and the flash from the controller boards, just saying. :)

@EEVblog just a tip keep the USB connecters on the board and also any connecters that are on the outside of the casing /boards ☺

I remember 40 years ago I used to get a right buzz finding electronic equipment and stripping motors, amplifiers, speakers, transformers etc etc. Brings back good memories. And I still enjoy stripping old equipment till this day ☺

20:04 I've built a reflector using that heating element... it's a 425W halogen tube(at least in those that I took apart). 2 or 3 of those also can be used as an electic heater if you put it in a black metal case. Be warned! Acrillic paint will burn of easily if you don't respect a proper distance(wich makes it less efective), or don't protect if from overheating. That thing can heat up metal over 100 degree C wile most paint supports only about 60 - 80 degree C max. 23:35 That lens is in angle to deflect the laser beam exactly to that rotating mirror.

I took apart the exact same fax a few months ago. The LCD panel is pretty easy to reclaim as it is HD44780 compatible. The steppers and the smps were a good trophy as well...

I've used the motors from printers a few times, the ones with gears are great! You can hook them up to a simple rectifier and use them to make kinetic powered circuits. I use them with sound synthesizers, I recommend trying it out :)

I have a stock of many thousands of parts, from gears to diodes, and caps, to FET's, toroids, and IC's that I got by pulling parts from junked electronics and consumer products. I once spent 4 hours one day pulling parts and estimated I had recovered nearly a thousand dollars US worth of parts. Electronics, if I'm not building it, or fixing it, I'm scrapping it, and sorting it.

The metal rods are great for home made cnc machines and 3d printers, anything you need to make an x, y grid and have the motors move, though the plastic pulleys aren't that robust and wouldn't hold up to much abuse.

12:35 We now have your fingerprint to put on file... Appreciate that mate!

make a 3D printer with the rollers and motor

I always take those little connectors - both the pcb side as well as the wire-side. Excellent for connecting your custom projects.

Sir with the right size copper connector you can fashion a torch tip with a Gear inside of the copper and it Make a Nice Flame

You might want a list of the fully working stuff I've found this year.. I cant do one, there are too many! Off the top of my head: Stereos, Big magnifying ring lights in need of a bulb, loads of aquariophilia stuff, small tanks, bubblers, pumps, (woohoo pcb etching tanks), Numerous scanners, including an extra flat travel one. That's excluding the stuff needing minor repair, often purposefully disabled by the previous user, usually severed power cords.. And that's limiting to electronics!

If you are starting out on the cheap, a lot of those connectors and buttons are useful to stockpile, like USB ports and power connections... the 'flat flex' or ribbon cable connectors might be useful if you have plans...

actually, the laser scans across a special coating on an alluminum tube that gets charged elecrically when hit by the laser, wich then attracts the toner powder and when the tube turns, it deposits the toner on the page and then the page gets heated and the toner sticks to it. hope that clears it out for ya!

Thinking of your junk bin makes me think of the difference between OUR "useful" and everybody else's "useful".

I actually pick these up, tear down for useful components and recycle the rest. The plastics go to the recycle bin. The metal goes to the scrap yard. The boards go to recyclers on eBay after I get what I want and gold bits go to gold recyclers. I get good stuff for projects and make money at the same time. Not much, but something to pay for gas. Lol.

Once I disassembled an HP printer and got two useful things: Bluetooth USB Stick, WiFi USB Stick. I use them in my pc, They are bare board, no enclosure, but very good. I put the Bluetooth and win7 identified its driver fast, but the Wifi was not easy to find the drivers.

I once used a fuser roller assy from a laser copier to make a pcb toner transfer roller :-) definitely a keeper

A very familiar experience. Enjoyed the tear downs!

I use the stepper motors and flat glass from old multifunction printers ($3-5 at the thrift store) for my robotics / 3D printer projects.

I got to where I'm keeping random screws and nails and bolts, but I wonder if I 'll have need for springs, capacitors, etc in the kind of things I do for hobby building. Trying to think how much I should spend to take time on tearing down more of these things or just handing them off to someoe else who might benefit from it. Thanks for the tear-down!

Those hardened steel linear rods make for great gear shafts, drive shafts, etc...

I would have kept all the USB ports.

I used to go dumpster diving a long time ago... i should start doing it again

Save every screw you remove and keep all the different sizes in an old jar. There may be a missing one on something you get in the future which you can quickly replace by picking through the ones you have collected.

The resistor and diode on plastic holder is used for HV discharge from opto cylinder. Otherwise it will not grab toner (charge up by laser) and not put it on paper.

My guess is that the markings are for alignment during assembly (or even just alignment aids used when printing the plastic strip) and not read by the sensor.

I did this all the time when I was a kid. Time to restart my junk pile!

Wish I could find a room like that. Take the salvageable parts out and eBay them

A cool use would be to use the laser module to print traces directly on to a photosensitive coated board, but i am guessing one would need to replace the laser diode with a UV one.

The opto interrupt in Samsungs tend to be the reason they get tossed. The LED fades and the sensor stops working, making it jam all the time.

The fuser unit from one of these laser printers is quite useful if you are making your on PCB`s with the toner transfer method, ... just take the PCB and the transfer paper and run it throu ... you`ll still need the powerunit for it thou, and perhaps the motor, but heck, you are getting yourself a easy to make "toner transfer unit" :)

I think it's more along the lines of chance of actually doing that vs. difficulty of desoldering such a large surface mount package vs. the cost and availability of a new part. Not to say you can't do it if a low budget and high patience motivates you properly.

As a foot note to the laser diode, there are some nasty elements to playing around with them depending on the wavelength. Most of these diodes are 808nm IR and when you power them up you see a piss poor red illumination, they is in fact pumping heaps of energy out in the non visible spectrum. BE CAREFUL, they WILL snot your eye. On the plus side you can take the KTP/YVO4 crystal and all of the optics from your green laser pointer ( assuming it is 808nm ) and use the source as to pump the crystal and emit 532nm. I'm not going into the physics of 3 and 4 state population inversion systems, however, through a series of frequency doubling ( second harmonic generation ), a high power green laser can be achieved. Make sure you keep the same orientation to the LD as the original pointer and you are off and running. If you don't keep the correct orientation nothing will come out. Admittance angel is important but if you play around enough green photons will come streaming out.. Lastly, I suggest TEC cooling the crystal of your duty cycle will be in the order of a few seconds and the life of the crystal will be reduced significantly as this method is at best 30 percent efficient; therefore, 1 watt 808nm in, 200-300mw out at a crystal temp of 23C. Have Fun!

That device at 19:00 is probably the paper tray sensor. I did not see where you got it from but on some printers there are guides in the paper tray to identify what kind of paper is in the machine such as 8.5 x 11, legal or A4. When you adjust the paper tray, it presses on different areas of the sensor. So that might be what it is.

You're so laid back Dave, Wish I could work at your shop with you!

I tend to collect the inter-board cables and the matching plugs from the board, as well.

I have a bunch of these and after my first year down I figured best to keep them together cause they take less space and are safer that way till I have use

You can use the springs to tension the steel wire of a hot wire cutter for polystyrene cutting. As the wire gets hot it expands in length. So we need a spring to tension it and to conduct electricity to the wire.

I've taken apart some laser printers and found halogen lamps used as heaters. They are double-ended tubular lamps 27.5cm in length with R7S base.

Those motors with the gears and the printer head slider could be useful to build a camera dolly for time lapses and panoramic shots

We are so jealous of your dumpster room.

The metal as I used in a trolly suitcase. They are exact the caliper of what China suitcase makers are making but with lower strength.

Those linear way rods on the carriages are worth keeping if you're into motion control/cnc stuff.

Sometime in the future, when robots rule the world, this will be considered a horror movie.

I think that little section with the resistor and diode is maybe connected to ground, and is used to make sure there is no static on the rollers or maybe something like that, although that would make more sense for a toner printer.

Just about to fall asleep and boom, "EEVBlog uploaded a video". Every. Single. Time.

Reminds me of my boyhood sessions in the garage taking stuff apart except none of this stuff existed when I was a boy, ha, ha.

use the motor modules for a 2d laser printer or 3d printer?

Hey that laserjet 1010! Why do you destroy it? I took it from my uncles office and its works flawlessly!

Instructables.com has many pages of re-use ideas for the parts that Dave explained.

You should teardown the fuser because the heat element is an halogen lamp. In your case thats 220v. And you can use that.If you look at the power supply pcb its direct power from mains it only got a relay in between.highly recommend you take it out.

You missed out on a really interesting piece on that linear actuator for the inkjet. It looked like it had one of those optical feedbacks for positioning, a plastic strip with lots of small stripes on it and a reader head in the cartridge holder. Depending on the construction of the optical reader it can be dead simple all the way to completely impossible to read using a micro controller though.

This was the only source of components for me growing up in Zimbabwe. The projects you could build were dictated by the components available on junk boards.

The print head mechanism is great for inverted pendulums

The sensorboard @ 15:57 is not cold cathode but a 3 color led bar with a foto resistor bar next to it. I thought cold cathode was only used with the ccd-scanners.

Apparently, UrJTAG can be used with the USB Blaster and many different devices. The pinouts on most things probably won't match the standard Blaster cable though, so you'd need to solder the individual signals to the correct pins on your device. You'd also need to know the memory map of the device, and what type of Flash chips or IO it has etc. (assuming UrJTAG supports it?).

maybe those encoder wheels could go some way toward turning a proxxon compound table into a mini CnC.

In the laser printer you have the laser diode which is in the laser diode scanner module. The laser diode is not going to be much use to anyone wanting to build say a laser pointer or anything. They are fairly low power 35 milliwatts or less I believe but I do know that they are infrared. So they are an invisible beam of laser light so not good for a laser pointer. Also very dangerous because even at that low to medium power they could blind you and you wouldn't even know that the invisible light beam hit your eyes so I was suggested people do not experiment with them unless you know what you're doing. And always wear protective layer laser goggles when experimenting with a laser diode, and make sure you have the goggles of the right wavelength protection.

i would use the high res wheel thing for a hard drive clock to better time it to make a more stable image.

The control board at 18:34 doesn't have nothing I see three SMD LEDs that are very usefull if you want to make something tiny that lights (for example keyboard illumination) or the quartz cap on the other side which can be replacement if clocks actually fault those or some microcontrollres (that one might design) sometimes require external cap for their clock but salvaging just for those isn't the cheapest thing to do

15:58: that white thin strip is a long led strip inside of the photo pickup assembly for the scanner. that model doesent use cold cathode lamp. also tip, all "cold cathode" lamp units have a pair of HV leads from a small(ish) flyback like board useually white sometimes black or gray or even brown, and thay are easily spotted upon the assembly useually, the ones that dont use the cold cathode lamp typicaly are much smaller due to the less comples designs that dont use the mirror strips& lenses.

I guess a little piece like that is easier to replace and more cost effective than the entire PCB.

you are a lucky dog to have scrap electronics at you finger tips, and i would love to see more done with the little color lcd screen . Light that bad boy up!

look at the working things that dave has found in the dumpsters, he doesn't just look around because there might be some useful components, frequently there are perfectly working devices that need no repair. where do you think the monitors he was talking about toward the end of the video came from? even if each is only worth 25 bucks, it was still a waste to toss them; i bet they are worth closer to 50-60 bucks each.

Gonna be looking at VHDL programming and microcontroller implementation subjects at my university. Want to specialize into microcontroller and advanced circuitry design so yeah for me those microcontrollers seem like a great project

I wonder if the cartridge slider can be modified into a printer that prints circut designs directly onto the copper to create a PCB without printer transfer per iron or fotopositive methode at home. Might save a lot of chemicals and cleannup time in the kitchen.

probably that mystery plastic component with the resistor and diode is probably the WI-FI antenna some of these units that have WI-FI use cheap antennas such as the one in question.

I think the resistor has something to do with dis-assembly safety. High voltage is used in those copiers and since it's reached using Villard cascade voltage multiplier, which utilizes diodes and capacitors, it's best to have a way to discharge it automatically. Those are my guesses only tho! Would love feedback on this theory.

Fair enough, cheers for replying none the less man.

The Bear G comments are hilarious cool video brother

i have HP deskjet 710 and it is working as a text printer for almost 10 years now!! NO PROBLEM!!

Usually infra-red, not enough power to be interesting.

... I spotted some Finnish text. XD I really didn't expect that... It's in the lazer module 21:20 in the yellow label starting with the word "VARO!" if anyone was interested...

@13:00 Isn't that more like a little camera, the like you will find inside a mouse ? Those markings at the beginning of the tape suggested me like they are calibration points that the sensor will recognise.

Usually they're about 5mw tp 7mw. Or in high speed commercial grade printers they can be about 20mw with TE cooling. The wavelength is 780 nm.

10:38 -11:02 See that weird "barcode" behind the glass? That is actually the end position marker (instead of a switch) If the scanner "sees" that, It will know that that is the end of the flat bed scanning area. I guess they do detect it this way to avoid having the cost of an endswitch, software programming is cheaper. Had an old AGFA snapscan once which used the same way of detecting the end, no physical switch in it whatsoever.

Hi guys, I'm just getting into electronics repair RIGHT from scratch. There's actualy VERY few books or training videos on how to do it... which is weird. So i'm watching guys like this to try to learn. I'm actually go to start to practice Soldering now when i get a station, I have some broken PS3's and stuff that i can mess around with that i got for free just to learn to use the tools of Soldering etc. Problem is, i only have about 90 euro to spend on a Soldering station with heat gun. Can anyone recommend a good cheap station that's not gonna go on fire and blow up due to how crumby it is? I'd really appreciate some info, thanks!

Heating elements? Laser optics? High voltage power supply? The only thing I'm thinking at this point is Death Ray. :)

It's usually infrared, power in few milliwatts. I.e. much lower than you can find in DVD-RW drives. Scanning mechanics is very useful though :-)