Cut the entire gear reduction housing with spindles and save it as an assembly with all hardware and motors attached. It is far easier to reuse them in a project if you keep the matching gears together and have a plate setup with the right spindle spacing. It is easy to cut and modify it to make a smaller arrangement later or use the plate and spacing as a template you can physically measure and replicate. I find the screws and hardware are what I reuse the most. Also, if you have the time, labeling what attached where on the power PCB will make it possible to reuse parts of that circuit. There are things like a diode capacitor voltage multiplier that can be used in other projects. There is usually an interesting triac arrangement for the heating element, (although I've always found a ni-chome wire based heating element in the ones I've taken apart). The tiny square inductors on the power supply are usually a step-up voltage type and they often have a through-hole TO-92L MOSFET driving them. The laser mirror motor is brushless too. The laser module contains a really good laser driver/power supply. It must have a low capacitance/accurate current source in order to turn on and off extremely quickly. My dream is to take a laser printer apart just enough to get the laser working with a drive mechanism for a PCB instead of the paper/drum arrangement. If I replace the laser diode with a UV laser, and get the board to pass through at the same rate as paper, I should be able to print designs onto photoresist covered copper clad to make circuits. The trick will be making a setup that uses the original printing toolchain built into the printer. This would mean I just need to print the circuit layout artwork directly from a PDF and the printer would expose the photoresist directly. No need to make a transparency. I know Marco Reps uploaded his attempts to do this with a Lexmark printer that already has a flat printing pass through slot made for printing CD labels. He didn't stick with the project because of issues and it could only do single sided prints. I'm curious if a simple microcontroller could control and align the board feed rate to make a double sided setup that skips the transparency step. Who knows if I'll ever get around to that project though...I do have a working spare laser printer already though :-)
Totally, modules are worth a lot more than components, when it comes to re-using stuff. As for the UV idea, just keep in mind, you can't use lenses, evrything have to be mirrors. Optics responds differently to UV vs IR and your spot would be totally out of focus. There is a good chance of a mirrors only setup in the printer. Even, your best route may actually be feeding the laser-diode the raster data, while a motor moves the photoresist below. (direct to PCB) No need for graytone e.t.c., you just need to figure out how to feed data into the laser-driver. You would need a fairly fast processor, and likely combine SPI & DMA somehow. Since the photoresist responds way slower than a photocell (the drum), you may want to scan your design really slowly. Like high-power UV laser and cm per secound/minute.
@@erlendse Thanks, the optics hadn't crossed my mind yet but is obviously critical in retrospect. I haven't seen a mirror based culminating system, but perhaps I could retrofit the threaded brass tube and lens from a laser pointer. I have one that can focus to a minuscule dot at around 4cm. It is capable of burning (smoldering) anything dark colored on contact. Not bad for $2 on AliEx. I tried to get a few more of these, but none have come with the same threaded tube/lens since. I have a few other focusing setups that are similar from some laser party lights but haven't rigged them up to test their focal properties. The challenge for the laser driver seems to be a clean switching supply with low capacitance from the little bit I've read, thus the reason to attempt using the OEM system with different laser diodes. Development of such a system from scratch is beyond my current software capabilities. I tested the cheap 405nm laser pointer on a test panel with my last photoresist etch. That setup resolved fine lines with the dot focus set to around 4cm and moving the laser/material as fast as I could in a controlled manner. I've tuned my photoresist setup according to the Dupont Riston 200 datasheet setup. I used Riston 200 before as small quantities are available on eBay, but the cheap Chinese photoresist works about as well if it is fresh. Dupont lists a even faster laser specific film but I doubt anyone will sell it for an honest price in small quantities. Anyways, the R. 200 datasheet method requires a low strength developer solution and lower intensity exposures than I've seen/read in many tutorials and articles. I use the sun for exposures, carry my board from a dark bathroom to the sun completely covered, and expose the artwork for just under 3 seconds in direct sunlight, recover, and develop. I can't even see the image in the film until a few seconds after it is in the developer. It fully develops to sharp edge copper in less than a minute and a half. After that, it finishes curing in the sun for a few minutes while I get the acid setup ready to etch. Most people, my past self included, seem to over expose the film. This requires a stronger developer solution and a lot of time/rubbing effort to get useful results. I keep my developer solution as hot as I can tolerate with latex gloves and lightly rub the unexposed areas. It works very fast and is easy to over develop if I'm not careful to remove it as soon as it is done and rinse in tap water. Anyways, those are the conditions where the laser seems potentially effective at high-ish speed. It's completely unscientific, and your probably right about it not working at printing speeds. Projects are rarely as simple as my imagination but I keep on dreaming :-) Thanks again for the advice. -Jake
You are right, whenever I take apart stepper motors from old printers and scanners, I always keep them attached to the reduction gear assembly. The gears make it much easier to work with the motor.
Some printers have a high voltage and current power supply that can be very useful as they are of good quality. You only have to manually connect the stand-by pin (usually to ground or + 5v) and merge the outputs to use in projects, cnc's, etc ... In some older printers where stepper motors were used, there is the possibility to unsold the stepper motor driver, make a pcb with the necessary components for the chip to work, and use it.
Thanks for reminding people how to not throw things out so easily. To buy then desperately it would cos more than the printer. Good video to show people how to not throw so much stuff out. People should also look online for what else they can do with the parts. Every time I thought I did not need something and threw it out I say I should have kept it since I needed it later on and can not find it in stores easily. If someone is going to throw it out put it free online. I have seen so much working products thrown out as well from big screen tv, printers, bikes, game systems, laptops, etc. People should not waste so much. Another idea is people can try to learn and try to find the problem to fix it. Also people can make money from this trash since as you said the metal parts if you collect enough can make money. Also "some" of the plastic parts can be used especially the flat parts.
Freecycle is a good way to keep random things useful, too: (BTW, while I'm commenting - thanks for the brilliant channel, LS! :) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freecycle_Network www.freecycle.org/
You should do a whole series on tear down of different electrical items to salvage parts i.e vacuum cleaners, LCD TVs, washing machines, fridges, laptops, etc.
I would suggest exploring stuff yourself. What you can use depends on what you know/can figure out, and what you are trying to do/build/create. Vacuum cleaners have switch, the motor with fan, and the retractable cable that may be of interest. LCD TV's have speakers+amplifiers, power supply, driver+backligth with diffusers, the rest kinda require special projects to use. The polarizers are hard to get off the glass! Washing machines have motors, solenoid valves, locks, pumps, level-sensors and the control board (supply, relays, LED's, buttons e.t.c.). Mechanical timers are interesting, but likely too specialized for actual use. Fridge is compressor(sealed in gas), tubing, lamp, thermostat, door switch, not a lot to them. Please don't vent the gas to air. Laptops have mainboard (if you are into that stuff, integrated cricuits e.t.c.), screen, battery, touchpad, keyboard(needs eletronics on mainboard). It's quite much up to you, there are also casings (sheet metal/plastic), drums, filters, wiring, rubber feets, springs, shock absorbers e.t.c.
@@erlendse Anyone with some technical abilities for sure be able to salvage what ever they need. But as for making content for the channel goes it would interesting viewing.
Honestly, to make a good well explained teardown video takes a LOT of figuring out/knownledge to be good. Like the different voltages in the printer and their uses, the polygon mirror motor controller signals, the photocell next to the laser, just lots of stuff.
I've been thinking of converting an old laser printer to a laminator, as they have the heating element and the rollers and are free all the time. Just need to modify it to accept thicker material and hack the control system. Thanks for showing the teardown, really like these videos so I don't have to do it myself. lol
Kindly tell me what is name of this tape (sticker) that can be seen after removing magnetic roller at 3: 45 time in this video Thanking you in anticipation
My friend give a big old copy machine and i dont know how to take all the parts and electronics for my future project but i dont know where the screw so make a video about it
A bit older inkjet printers have stepper motors inside them and the later ones have a stepper motor in the scanner. The newest ones have brushed DC motors with optical rotary encoders inside them.
Well, they paid me to lead people to total failure to buy a new one, but those big corporations don't know that a man doesn't have a TV, a cell phone, a vacuum cleaner, and so on every month. They have so many huge ones pays to not know that there is an ordinary people or people, it is a small group of people who live in fear and paranoia and develop more and more than fear, they do not think bad of you but do not even think of you and yourWhen you say you don't have him, he talks to you because he thinks you're joking and keeps talking about something else, when you see that you prefer to say to yourself: Less money and In Croatia, they paid a singer who filled stadiums not to sing and not to sing, and millions of people love his lyrics, which are really corporations, and like the state of an independent citizen ...!
@@stuartcommon4651 Group 2B does not mean that something is carcinogenic. What's the point of the rating system, when you don't know how to read it? For substances in 2B quite the opposite of "carcinogenic" is probably true, because there isn't any evidence to put it into a higher group. Even meat and coffee are in the higher classification 2A. Not to mention processed meat, alcohol, tabacco smoke, car exhausts and UV radiation, which are in class 1 and actually proven to be harmful. So no need to panic. Not only that, just because something contains a component that on its own might be harmful, does not mean at all that it is harmful when used as an ingredient. You don't want mercury around you all the time (although in metallic form it is harmless, unless you listen to media, which don't care about facts but just want another panic, similar to what's happening with lead, glyphosate or mobile phone "radiation"). But in an amalgam it is totally fine.
@@superdau I apologise I should have said possibly, but the way I said it came out like it definitely is carcinogenic. I fully get what you're saying about something being an ingredient, it's like solid asbestos roofing. It's perfectly fine as a product but when it's broken... a bit like ingredients in toner, perfectly fine in a toner cartridge, until it's broken, then there's a possibility. I guess that's all I was trying to say. I certainly wouldn't want my kids to open a toner cartridge lol
