I’m starting on a project that I’ll be using stepping motors and belts, and after looking for cheap parts online, I thought I could do better by stripping down some old scanners.
People are excited to get rid of there old computer stuff, the great thing is it doesn't matter if the old scanner works. Even if it doesn't turn on likely the motor and mechanical parts are still good for salvage. I posted a ad on Portland’s craigslist in the wanted section and got several responses, in a week I had a bunch of scanners for free, I only had to pick them up. I found that putting in the ad that you would be reusing the parts for a robotics project people were very interested.
Scanners are easy to take apart, they are pretty simple machines and generally there are some catches, and a screw or two around the edges of the top cover.
Once the cover is off, you can start stripping parts, the valuable and easy to use parts are the stepper motor, linear slide, belt and gears. There may also be an optical end-stop sensor, and some buttons that are easy to re-use. You can get more hardcore and try to salvage parts on the actual circuit board, but that takes a bit of research to figure out what is useful.
Here are the parts from two example scanners, both have similar parts and took about 10 minutes to gut.
From all my scanners I salvaged at least:
- 1 Stepper Motor
- 1 Linear slide bar
- 1 Timing belt
- 1 Set of gears for the belt
- A few buttons and LED’s
If I were to buy those parts I would be spending at least $20-30, and they are all in good usable condition, just for the stepper motors alone it was worth my time. Also most of not all of those scanners would have went to the landfill. I was able to recycle most of the electronics, and I put the plastic shells in the city recycle bin, that’s something you can’t do while the electronics are still inside. That’s a net win anyway you look at it.
Update: While it's outside the scope of this article (10 minutes or less) to get into the details of salvaging more electronics, read the comments below for some more interesting comments and uses or other parts found in scanners.