Anything electronics components/etc worth harvesting from an old desktop image scanner?

October 9, 2007 10:19 AM

Is there anything worth mining/harvesting out of a random old desktop scanner? I was about to throw this heap away, when I decided to take it apart.

There's a few long narrow mirrors, a mototech motor, what appear to be a few rings made of lead (?), the little tank-tread band, and the long narrow bulb. I could probably use the glass with a picture frame. Would there be any hidden treasures native to desktop image scanners that'd be worth trying to sell, like a specialty lens or something? A rare kind of capacitor? There seems to be a number of hunks of lead in this sucker.

posted by Quarter Pincher to Technology (10 answers total)

Not sure if there is anything worth ebaying inside there, but you could always try This...
posted by Bjkokenos at 10:25 AM on October 9, 2007 [2 favorites]

Lifehacker recently posted directions on how to make a super-bright lamp from an old scanner here.
posted by metahawk at 10:46 AM on October 9, 2007

At the very least you could recycle it.
posted by sharkfu at 11:23 AM on October 9, 2007

If it has a stepper motor in it, those are sometimes worth money. I ripped a few of them out of old printers and scanners once and sold the lot of them on eBay for a pretty penny.

Not sure if the sensor assembly is worth anything. I tend to doubt it, because there are just so many of them floating around, and their usefulness is limited compared with motors.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:31 AM on October 9, 2007

The problem with selling reclaimed parts is testing and perceived quality. That and information about how to use the parts in the first place - new part sellers are happy to give you all the info, but finding specs for old stuff can be a real challenge. That said, I don't really see why there isn't more of a market for that kind of stuff - there doesn't appear to be - if anyone knows where to look, I'd love to check it out myself.

Perhaps part of the problem is average price.. It isn't really worth ones time to complete online sales with a dollar value much below $10, and on Ebay that goes up to $20. For used components to be worth that much, they have to be pretty special.
Sure, there are products and business models that can lower those numbers, if somebody wants to debate the thresholds I suggest, feel free..

I'm sure there are many interesting projects you could do with the mechanism though.
posted by Chuckles at 11:52 AM on October 9, 2007

This guy made a scanning camera out of one.
posted by JonB at 12:16 PM on October 9, 2007

The long light bulb is a cold cathode light. It's like a miniature flourescent tube. Cold cathodes provide backlighting for LCD monitors and most other LCDs and can be put to use for lots of cool mods.

Case mods like this one come to mind.

And there are lots more where that came from.
posted by SlyBevel at 12:40 PM on October 9, 2007

More on cold cathodes at wiki.

IMHO, it's by far the gee-whiziest harvestable component that would be common to any desktop scanner.
posted by SlyBevel at 12:43 PM on October 9, 2007

I have used stepper motors out of scanners for stuff. There are lots of cool diy-things you can do with them, but you usually need to get into microcontroller programming for them.
posted by RustyBrooks at 1:23 PM on October 9, 2007

If you make your own printed circuit boards, you can use the scanner enclosure to expose the blank boards:

Install a bright lamp inside, print the (reversed) circuit traces on transparent overhead film, put the film with the ink side towards the photosensitive layer on the printed circuit board, put on scanner bed.
posted by kandinski at 4:45 AM on October 10, 2007