Hi all,
I often use components pulled from pcbs not in use. When something breaks or I find broken electronics, i disassemble it, salvage what i can and scrap the rest. I havent had much bad luck with it so far. Does anyone else do this?
Every experimenter I have ever known, myself included, has done this. When I was a kid learning electronics, I never had enough money to buy new parts. Dumpster diving behind radio and TV repair shops yielded plenty of broken "stuff" from which to extract used, but viable and useful, parts. Later in life, I found other sources of broken electronics that were also not "cost effective" to repair, but available for the asking. It's a good way, IMO, to become familiar with parts, especially if you can find a commercial part number and look it up to yield a datasheet.
Over a period of about forty-something years in the last century, I accumulated quite a hoard of parts... resistors, capacitors, inductors, semiconductors of all kinds, vacuum tubes, TTL and CMOS integrated circuits, analog op-amps, transformers in power, audio, and pulse persuasions... the list goes on and on and on. I have never been able to "give up" parts that I have salvaged, although now I realize that I will never be able to use all that stuff in my remaining lifetime. Although my oldest son is an electrical engineer, he never acquired his father's scrounging and hoarding habit. So I gave away most of my vacuum tubes a few years ago to a guy who restores vintage radios. Most of the rest of it I left in the basement of our house in Dayton, Ohio, when we retired to Florida this year. I hate to abandon all that "treasure," but the truth is I will never use it.
My father took a dim view of my "electronics hobby" activities when I was growing up, complaining that I never built anything of practical value. This was certainly true for a long time, because I built stuff only to test my knowledge of electronics acquired up to that time. After satisfying myself that I understood a circuit or concept, it was disassembled so the parts could be re-used on the next "project". I do remember Dad's last derogatory comment and this motivated me to set myself the goal of "proving" him wrong. I actually bought mail-order parts with money I had earned mowing lawns and delivering newspapers so I could construct a "professional" looking project. This turned out to be an SCR light dimmer, which were popular DIY projects back in the day, but are so ubiquitous today that no one "rolls their own" anymore. The project had the desired effect. I plugged his living room reading lamp into the dimmer and showed Dad how it worked. He seemed suitably impressed and I never heard any more derogatory remarks after that. Shortly afterward, I graduated from high school and enlisted in the Air Force, where I learned about some real electronics.
. I even sold the diffuse smokey-grey LED overlay and the extruded aluminium housing the whole thing came in!
