how far will you go to save/re-use parts?

[imaradiostar]

So...I was pulling some caps off an old turret board and saw some 1/16" garolite board from another project on my bench and decided that I didn't wanna waste the turrets, Now I find myself carefully removing 70+ Keystone 1540-4 turrets and filing them to work with the 1/16" board.

Am I sick? New turrets are what, $.20?

jamie

[tubeswell]

Doesn't matter how sick you are - Good on you for re-using stuff.

[randomair]

You should see my parts bins! They are loaded with scrapped parts. I like the eclectic appearance of my builds/repairs,its gives them character. You may be burning more time than money, but its so much better than just scrapping the whole bit, i can dig it.

[txstrat]

I even spare 2 inch long used wires for later builds.
Not that I have used them already.

[ctcpete]

In my last job, I kept a box of old/bad/questionable parts I referred to as my junk yard. About once a year or so I would use something from it that would get my system running and save my butt. I was taking service calls on a 24hr basis and nothings worse then trying to fix a system at 2:00 am or on a Sunday and not having the part. We used to actually call someone near the home office to go to the office and ship parts by courier to the airport and then to the site. Not that there are any flights at that hour anyway. As any pack rat will tell you as soon as you shit can something, invariably you need it in the near future.

[drewl]

I'm a pack rat!
I have boxes of stuff at home and at work, but hey....I have tons of odd parts for fixing almost anything!

[imaradiostar]

I'm about to move across the country so I'm starting to think all this collecting has been a bad idea. It creates more projects than I ever finish!

jamie

[blckmynnse8]

i've been digging through the scrap board bins at work for aeons. it wasn't until recently that i started looking through all of the boxes of wire, components, metal enclosures etc... that i've been salvaging. all of a sudden it hit me just how much junk i have acquired for free that many folks would be willing to pay money for and realized it was all worth it. there is SOOO much to grab from the scrap bins before it goes to be recycled that i can't even begin to take all of the useful parts.

one of the real kickers though was running across the most simple vco circuit i've ever seen that used a unijunction transistor. well, it happens that the entire time that book has been collecting dust on my shelf i've been throwing away scads upon scads of unijunctions simply because they had fallen ever so slightly out of spec making them unusable for the application. so now i'm on a mad scramble to dig for them and i just managed to get a decent amount before our full scrap bins started their journey to destruction.

now that we're starting a new bin i'm taking stock of every board that gets slam-dunked in there. i have a lifetime's worth of lm324 quad op-amps, that unfortunately must be tested first before i use them. i take most of the red led's that have a decent amount of lead length on them. even though they're a dime a dozen i even take electrolytic capacitors at times, if they're 100uF and up. at the moment my big thing is snagging pushbutton switches... these things are pretty sturdy and if bought new they'd probably be at least $1-$3 a piece, the same boards have a 8.2uH inductor that i snag for some mysterious reason as well.

lately something that just came in handy are these old choke coils i've salvaged. i'm getting ready to build this simple am regen receiver that needs around 30 feet of enameled copper wire and guess what??? i knew i grabbed those for some reason. even though i have some old plate tuning caps, i'm still going to just use aluminum foil/wax paper inside a phone book instead.

kinda sucks though because sometimes my entire breaks and lunches at my bread + butter job involves desoldering at a mad pace.

but being a pack rat like this has saved me alot of money... now as well as down the road. i also figure with the way the economy is going, if i have to endure being part of a "budget reduction" i'll have TONS of cool stuff to keep me occupied.