Looking for ideas on where various motors, linear actuators, pumps, etc. can be found.
No particular project in mind, just wondering where others have found some good parts instead of buying new.
E.g., is it worthwhile to disassemble an old printer for its motors/belts/rails, anything useful in a vacuum machine, ceiling fan motors, what kind of products would have linear actuators. Maybe there's a certain car lock solenoid that's dirt cheap or a windshield washer pump that works better than ones marketed toward hobbyists, etc.
Maybe certain things to look for in thrift shops.
Paper shredder had circuit board with LEDs, tactile switches, PCB mounted relays, etc. plus a xmit/rcv LED pair for a paper sensor and an IR distance sensor to tell when it's full. The motor was too integrated into the shredder mechanism to bother with. Although, curiously, it had a basic encoder consisting of an IR LED pair scanning the motor shaft which had half the diameter missing on the end.
Two(!) dehumidifiers had the abovementioned circuit boards plus switches for tank full sensors, 7-segment displays and AC blower motors.
Microwave: circuit board, oddball 27v(?) motors, door switches. It even had a schematic tucked away in an inner pocket! I need to look at that and figure out how to use it for a device timer.
Those lift chairs have linear actuators in them. For a small, cheap linear actuator the generic ones you find on the web are easier than crawling around a wasp infested junkyard.
Scrapped a mini-boombox that had cassette & CD motors.
My old SilverReed typewriter had two stepper motors and two brushed dc motors, two identical photo interrupters and a strange looking 18 pin integrated voltage regulator/motor driver.
I took a small inkjet printer to pieces hoping to find a stepper motor but it just had two really cheap DC motors and some very fine encoders. It had 2 peristaltic pump mechanisms. And some toothed belting and some slotted optical switches.
Servos seem to be a good source of cheap low voltage DC motors - and you get a few gears for free. (Assuming of course that the really cheap 130 size motors are not suitable)
Laser printers and copiers have lots of useful parts. Optical sensors, steppers, stepper drivers or whatever.
Linear actuators are pretty rare. You usually have to buy them unless you're extremely lucky finding one that's exactly the right size you need. If you're trying to build something which also exists as a commercial product (say, a self-opening back door on a car) then finding a scrapped one of those might give you a working actuator.
Car door lock actuators are cheap. They usually only have 25mm travel. I found it very easy to put a small slide potentiometer inside the case of one I bought a few years ago, so I could make a feedback controlled actuator.
Inspired by the parts I found in my typewriter, I bought another typewriter for 1 €. This one I won't take into parts. Even though it seems to work properly, I'm going to build a plotter of it. I hope to find a stepper motor, which could rotate the roll in both directions.
There is always such things as this in various auction sale sites: Public Surplus: Auction #1907188. No bid, yet, but lots of good stuff! Maybe something like this in your area.
I once bought a double rack, 7 ft. tall, full of stuff to develop auto emissions testing. Paid $0.99 and had to drive 200 miles round trip. Sold pieces on Ebay for over $400. Still have some of the stuff.
Flat bed scanners are good for steppers and rails, a lot of old scanners are not supported anymore by windows.
Old battery powered drills, the Nicad/NiMh types that are usually still good with gearbox, its the batteries that signaled their demise.
Any old tube type TV or old LCD monitors, for the small white plugs and sockets, cut the wires off as long as possible, also bridge rectifiers.
Keep an eye out for the grid-connect inverters used in solar panel installations, not repairable but good for power MOSFET, IGBT, big toroidal rings, and high volt caps.
(I have been asked to repair many, you open them up and look to see how big the hole burnt in the PCB is!!)
INTP:
Do you guys pull out the power supply/transformer bits as well, or do you yank motors, try to find specs online to see what kind of power they want?
I'm inclined to focus car parts as they're predictably 12V.
If the PCB is old enough to have the 50/60Hz transformer, yes, but if no info, then power capacity can be a bit of a problem, but check the power rating sticker of the device before you throw it out.
