Salvaging Useful Parts from Printers

There's a lot of handy things to salvage from inside the common printer.

Edited By Blue Heeler on 05/06/2019 23:39:11

They look like all the handy things I've had stashed away for 40-odd years.

Some day real soon now ....

And the day you have a shed clean out and throw anything out, the next day you'll need it

If you ever want to build a printer from scratch you'll have a good supply of parts.

The ground/polished stainless steel rods and bars are the only parts I have ever found another use for. Very handy indeed.

Love the ground rods, I've used so many of them over the years for different things (the older the printer the thicker the rods seem to be).

The motors I use for small gennys run off steam engines, but how many does a bloke need!

But how many do you need? How many steam engines do you make per week/month/year?

Although 3D printers are getting cheaper all the time, I would have thought that with a bit of electronic knowledge (That I haven't got) an old printer or two would make the basis of a 3D printer. Or use the encoders etc for some other positional device.

Forget the electronics for making a 3D printer. The only parts useful would be the rods I think, and modern printers don't really have those. They used to use stepper motors which could be useful, but now have DC motors and encoders, much less useful because you need quite tricky real-time software for accurate control. The life of an ink-jet printer is so short that they have to engineer out every cent of surplus cost.

There has been a bit on the media over the last day or so asking why can you buy a printer with ink for about half the price of new ink cartridges. I got a number of rods etc., from old flat bed scanners, from the days before they were combinded with the printer.

Ian S C

Because of two things.

1. The 400 per cent retail mark-up on ink cartridges.

2. The new printer comes with a cartridge that is about 20 per cent full.

This from my son who worked in a computer supply shop.

"Vintage" as in 10 year old + printers have the best pickings IMO.

Every new generation of printer they have worked out how to put in less metal and more plastic.

My first inkjet you could fit an enormous black cartridge instead of the 4 colours, and you could refill it with a syringe, and when the jets got irretrievably bunged up you bough a new cartridge as the jets were in it. I only need black and white, so colour cartridges just dried out. The next one included a chip on the cartridge which says 'no this cartridge is empty' so you have to buy a chip resetter. One inkjet I saw had a rubber pipe going to a bottle of ink mounted at the side of the printer. That's my sort of technology. Gave up eventually and bought a laser printer. By the time you've bought 2 or 3 sets of cartridges it's actually cheaper.

When I bought our last Laser printer I checked out:

Toner Refills

And found out that the toner cartridges that come with the printer have several parts missing that would indicate when it’s empty. Instead the printer decides for itself when they’re empty by the print count. Luckily you can buy the missing parts from the above link and fit them yourself. This also means you can “reset” the cartridges and use them until they are really empty.

That lovely bar of free cutting steel in the dead printer you always have to prise out before throwing it away ? It's now just a thin wall tube.... 2 motors was all i " saved " .

However , the smaller one , hooked up to a solar panel battery maintainer , gives amazing torque ! I was then thinking what could it power in the garden this summer ? A water pump for the water butt ? A fan in the pergola ? A RTP aeroplane ? A RTP car on the patio ? A fake beam engine in the middle of the lawn ? Watch this space !!

Any other ideas ?

Edited By Hacksaw on 01/06/2020 22:37:12

I am just cleaning up the Mother lode. 1 cabinet size compo printer weighs about 150 lbs. 4 regular printers. Net result? About 100 lbs of steel scrap, about 5 pounds of copper, about 5 pounds of steel shafts. About 100 "C" clips to put with the other couple of hundred. Couple of dozen small shafts. And a few hours of cheap entertainment. The motors are all stripped whilst watching the Telly at night. What ever it brings is all profit. Wifey knows I've lost it years ago, so no surprises there.