salvaged parts

[snufkin]

completelya completly new to this but so far Ive built 3 working fx and one pedal (boxed)


the pedal is the easy face which was from bought parts (all local too)

but the other two a small distortion and a range master were builds completely from salvaged parts 


I just wanted to post this to say to all the student and other poor fx builders you can get some pritty cool beginners stuff from skips dumps and outside peoples houses oh and charity shops for a few £


i got lots of good caps and resistors and transistors + a stereo jack form an old broken record player amp

and an old PC with a small broken external amp unit (must have been form a recording set up) gave me some pots a 9v socket and a mono and stereo 1/4 jack sockets

i also got a load of good wire some diodes some usable transistors and lots of trimmers (time to brake out dads multi meter to test the rest of the components)


i hope this makes you think!   thanks for all the info on this site and forum



oh yeah anything i can do with a these ics ?

ne555p

ka3843a

[aqautarkus]

ive just broke apart an old yamaha portasound keyboard, that had 4 jrc4558 chips in it amongst aload of other stuff, im saving them to build a couple of tubescreamer clones when i learn enough, at the moment seem to be killing verything i touch ;>( ill get there
chris

[snufkin]

is there a list of good things to salvage? online


or do any of the more seasoned members have good tips

for sources of usful parts or bulds with commnly salvagabul parts

[zpyder]

IC's:
JRC4558 (dual opamp)
TLC2272 (clean dual opamp)
NE5532 (dual opamp)
TL072 (dual opamp)
TL074
LM741
NE5532
LF353

Transistors:
2N5485 (JFET)
2N5457 (JFET?)
2N5088 (NPN)
2N5089 (NPN)
2N5087 (PNP)
J201 (JFET)
BS170 (MOSFET)
2N3904 (NPN?)
MPF102 (JFET?)
2N404a (?)
OC140 (?)

Diodes:
I don't know much about diodes but here are common ones:
1N4148
1N914
1N34a (germanium)
1N100
1N270
LED

and pretty much any resistors, capactitors, sockets, and other cool stuff you can get your hands on...


I just cut & paste my "buy these in bulk when I get some more money" list for you... 

[markm]

It's amazing what can be had if you just look around.
One man's garbage is another man's gold.
My wisdom for the day.

[captntasty]

I tried my hand at salvaging old vintage 60's transistor radios (european) for hard to find trannys - OC44, OC81D, etc.  Only rarely will you find them in the U.S. so it means shipping from Europe.  You would have to research which models and brands have which components - not hard as the vintage radio buffs love sharing info as much as we do.  They would probably have a coronary if they knew you were hacking them apart!  In the end it was less of a hassle to find a supplier of NOS trannys - yes more money but when you added it all up it evened out.  The place to find them would be tag sales, flea markets, etc.  Something to keep an eye out for but actively pursuing them is a bit cumbersome.

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Snufkin, keep an eye out for broken "home organs" from the 1960s. They can be the motherlode for Ge transistors!!
and, my regards to Moomintroll

[idlechatterbox]

snufkin thanks for posting a question that I had wanted to, but thought would just be too amateur. I live near a large recycling dropoff, and you'd be amazed at how much old (i.e., 70s, 80s) electronics gets thrown out. I had been thinking that it's a shame to just put all the components into a landfill, but then there's also the time element. So maybe I'd liked to hear from some of the more experienced DIYers on this aspect of Snufkin's question: does the required to tear apart, say, an old 70s stereo receiver and snip out or unsolder the caps and resistors do better than simply buying the parts online? I'm all for doing my part for the environment, and I like saving money, but to be honest, I've had a few occasions where by the time I tore apart a DVD player to get the transistors and caps, I found myself wondering if I had just spent an evening salvaging .10 cent parts.

Like I said, I just haven't done THAT many projects to know one way or another. Maybe an effects pedal every 6 weeks (life gets in the way of my doing more) and I tinker with old tube radios. From the sounds of things, some of you guys have a veritable assembly line in your workshops compared to me. New parts or cannibalized? 

[Somicide]

I'd be wary of older caps, myself.  But that's really it.  Anything else useful in those is up for grabs. 

Also, Pots, trimmers, knobs, are all more than $.10.  Just my $.02  .

[O]

It's amazing what can be had if you just look around.
One man's garbage is another man's gold.
My wisdom for the day.

Actually, a friend of mine used to say... One man's trash, is another man's girlfriend 

[markm]

 
I remember her......

[snufkin]

this has been very usfull to me thanks for the lists and tips

yeah i got about nine pots some dual ones to  so i saced quie a bit there


i m in the uk and in my small ciy there are loads of charity shops and i live in an area with allot of pensioners so there are old raidios in thoes shops all the time  usualy for not very much cash

[Jack]

I have a tremulus lune built entirely from a late 80's early 90's home phone on the desk infront of me,
also I took the casing from a cd-rom drive for a pretty sweet enclosure, that makes the total cost 8 australian dollars 

[snufkin]

that has to be the coolest thing ever


i am building the lune but from bought parts 


still i hear it sounds good and i dont have a tremalo pedal yet

[cakeworks]

Inspired by this thread, I went looking around the house for something to take apart. All I could find was a video player... but there are so many parts. probably the only usable ones are the caps (and its caps galore in there!) there are some ICs and some trannies (though i dont think they are anything worth salvaging, all the trannie names start with IC or Q)

I'll copy down some IC names:
IC5901
IC001
IC901

thats actually all i can find, oh and the biggest freaking diode i've ever seen. I'll take a photo tomorrow if anyone wants.

So is anything worth salvaging or did i just rip apart a vcr for nothing 

[idlechatterbox]

I'd like to see photos of the phone-to-tremelo pedal project! That's impressive. It's like those old stories about how the indians used every part of the buffalo 

As far as hacking parts of old PCBs, the problem I find is that the leads are so short. I'm not really great with a soldering iron to begin with, but when I only have a few millimeters of wire lead to work with... I either fry the component or end up wishing I wasn't too cheap to go to radio shack (which is a few blocks away).

They definitely don't build electronics like VCRs around the idea that people will someday be wanting to remove and reuse the parts.

Not that it's stopped me... 

[snufkin]

yeah we want photos of that 

i just walked past my local hiar dressers and they were throwing out an old les paul copy so i went in to the local guitar shop and got a new tunomatic and some better tuners and gave it to my little brother .......at least now there will be less ukele in the house  and beleve me thats a big plus


i also walked past some old arcade games in a skip  im gonna salvage them tonight


i saw one senior member had a heat gun and the caps and stuff just drop out when they use it

[christobean]

i just walked past my local hiar dressers and they were throwing out an old les paul copy
i also walked past some old arcade games

so you got a free axe? and video games? thats awesome.

a word on salvaging:  when you are just going through an old pcb pulling out every resistor, cap, and whatever else, you are probably better off just buying an assorted pack from somewhere like futurlec or smallbear or something, but if you have a good base of parts with reasonable lead lengths, and just need to find that last resistor or cap, salvaging is the way to go.  my reasoning is thus:  with reusing parts, you double your chances of trashing the part when u remove it and install it again, making for a lot of frustration in debugging.  i just broke down and bought a load of components, and now i can concentrate on building, not searching through a tin of tiny resistors, trying to decipher the scratched and battered codes.

[idlechatterbox]

I seriously need to move to a neighborhood where the hair dressers even HAVE a les paul, much less hand it to me as I walk by.... 

[birt]

i salvage caps, transistors, ic's, trimpots, inductors, and sometimes resistors.

ic's are hard to desolder but i found something great on my grandpas attic. it's a solderpoint on which he attached a metal blok with eight holes to desolder all the legs of an ic instead of one leg at a time. i haven't tried it yet but it's covered in solder so i guess it works. i'll probably put it on a cheap extra soldering iron so i don't have to switch solderpoints.