Salvaging philosophy

[Philip Davies]

I am a niggard!
I hope that does not shock you.
Some, close to me, are appalled.
I do have a scrap bin. For really worthless stuff. But hardly anything useable, or worth a penny goes into it. For fifty years, it’s been a habit to put anything that might be discarded into an oddments box for sorting later. I suspect many of us are the same, simply reluctant to throw away anything we might use later. And bitter regrets for what we have given away and too late, realising we will have to go and buy it. Not just the expense. Or the time wasted. But the lack of foresight!
One old chap I used to help would take any nut and throw it into a box of other old nuts (there were several, and sometimes they had bolts or screws or anything in them). It was just the nearest.
I organised cabinets of screws, etc for one depot workshop. A few weeks’ later, it appeared as if literally they had fallen and the contents scooped up randomly. Same again, after tediously re-sorting, a couple of months’ more. There were even cigarette ends.
I do not like muddle and hate being unable to find what I want, eg pair of hinges. If I save lots, then lots has to be sorted. Then there’s space needed for what’s saved. Then reorganisation when one category becomes too large or too variegated, and all the boxes must be moved around to accommodate it.
Twelve years ago I realized the value of non-ferrous scrap when we moved warehouses and the sparkies left. From then, as well as wood and tools salvaged from skips, it went on to saving anything electrical, or plumbing, etc. The charity I work for, supplying furniture, has several shops and I have tried to promote the idea that instead of throwing unsold donations away, we could organise collections for their scrap value. With the exception of one manager, only the guys at the warehouse with me do this, despite banging on about it for more than a decade. Last week half a van load of IT equipment came in, so a lot of that I’ve dismantled.



But it’s all getting out of hand. There are boxes within boxes, parts, smaller parts, sacks of flex (£1.30 per kilo), greasy copper, dry bright, zinc alloy, aly, pewter mugs(£10 a kilo) computer chips(do.) pcbs, stuff in the warehouse, stuff at home. More and more.
If I can’t work at my bench or have to move boxes outside to get into the workshop, it’s got to stop! I’ve had enough. There’s far, far better things to do. I’ve set a deadline of two months, and by then all that stuff will go!
Ps the smilie I want should show a head being systematically banged.

[mklotz]

I can certainly empathize with your quandary. Consider an approach along these lines...

Define three classes of materials and sort things into these classes...

1. Definitely of future utility - most raw materials, extra parts for home/shop appliances, etc.
2. Limited future utility - one of a pair, possible sources of small amounts of raw material, etc.
3. Scraps and remnants

Class 1 is always saved. Class 2 is stored sequentially into boxes labeled with the date the box was put into use. Boxes older than two years are emptied into the trash. Class 3 boxes are emptied every year.

Determining class at time of storage will be the hard part, of course, but as time passes you'll develop a feel for what is required to keep the total volume of "stuff" manageable.

Adjust my one and two year specs to your taste and memory. Any class 2 stuff I have in storage is long forgotten after two years so there's no real problem discarding it.

[Jon]

It's the "miscellaneous" category that always gets me. Seems like I have so many unique bits and pieces that can't be reasonably categorized with like items.

[mklotz]

Probably too OCD but keeping a record of how long some item you reused from the heap was in storage might be revealing. It would be one way to apply a "value" to all that might-need stuff.

I use fasteners and raw material all the time from my cache but I doubt I use more than one or two items a year from the pile of "I might need that someday".

Depends too on what you build. Building miniatures means that even tiny pieces of scrap have some potential value. My rule there is "if it weighs less than a nickel (5 grams), toss it".

[DIYSwede]

Define three classes of materials and sort things into these classes...

1. Definitely of future utility - most raw materials, extra parts for home/shop appliances, etc.
2. Limited future utility - one of a pair, possible sources of small amounts of raw material, etc.
3. Scraps and remnants

Class 1 is always saved.
Class 2 is stored sequentially into boxes labeled with the date the box was put into use.
Boxes older than two years are emptied into the trash.
Class 3 boxes are emptied every year.

Definitely time to bump this thread.
Being in charge for a prototype shop at an Arts University, I squirrel away raw stock, some PSUs with useful volts and amps outputs,
AC, DC and stepper motors and most electro-mechanical stuff: relays, switches etc. PCBs and displays straight into the trash.

Case study of stuff liberated from the Recycling center at work
(shared with a foreign aid government agency, a commercial bank, an "Interweb bureau" and a lunch restaurant):



About two hours of work in "de-constructing" these, using only screwdrivers, curiosity and brute force.
6 printers including: a handful 1"-ish polished 12" precision steel rollers, 3 dozens of 4-8 mm 12" drill rod axles with POM or even oilite bearings,
a dozen small DC motors with belts, some 4 & 6 mm roller bearings, some POM gears and other details, micro-switches and opto-couplers.
A couple of electrical and Sprag clutches in 4-6 mm dia and an odd electro-magnet. Loads of small springs.
6 PSUs with oddball DC V & A outputs, mains switches and RFI suppressing components.
Some POM & PC plastic sheets could be useful, otherwise plastics goes to the bin. All structural steel to the metals bin.
Personal gains: Besides feeling smug from saving the world yet again:
Looking totally like a Smurf from the CMYK toner with ditto inked-stained hands for the upcoming week.

Then, when I just dumped the scrap above - I found Providence had refilled the bins during the X-mas vacation:



Yep - 150 bucks worth of hardly used Pelican 1500 Protector Case (sans foam) and a metal box for my "Cheap-O-Meter".
Closed cell foam blocks and electric cutter all set in my shop to make the infills.
Not too bad for a 2 hour "stay-behind" after work?

[Philip Davies]

You did well to dismantle those printers so quickly. I hope that they weren’t destined for general rubbish/landfill. I’ve been banging on for years about our organisation throwing away non ferrous scrap: I estimate we could easily have made £5k a year or more. Loads goes into the dustbins, yet we have a formal mission statement on the environment. Of course, it would have been my job to process it all. Since I was a “voice crying in the wilderness”, I’ve given up on dismantling, although I will still strip flex! (Not for myself, of course)

[DIYSwede]

I've gotten experience thru the last few years, needing the salvaged stuff both at work and at home.
Really no need for wire cutters, figuring out to "reverse assembly" was pretty simple -
keep as much wiring/ connnectors on, and each unit as complete as possible.

Recycling centers are free of charge for private persons here, but "electronics"/ appliances will cost companies app 1 buck/ 2 lbs.
Hence I offered my services dismantling 3 big color printers at app 150 lbs apiece.
We recycle mainly copper and Al to scrapyards for app £1-2k a year, then the ordinary free recycle bins: plastics, paper and metal scrap.
Dumpsters with mixed landfill materials are pretty expensive nowadays.

"Confuser" servers and UPS:es also offers good power supplies: 15Ah SLA batteries and 12 V @ 50-ish amps.
Office table motor drives are the bread and butter for many one-off prototype projects in the shop.
Each castor wheel stand from office chairs also offers 2,5-3 kg of fine AlSi10Fe to remelt into raw stock - machines just excellently.
There's also >50 kg of that and Zamac scrap in buckets, and an 4kW electric furnace on my to-do list...
My first try-outs: DIY Foundry/ Hardening/ Annealing - Meccano Gallery

Cheers
Johan

[DIYSwede]

Salvaged, cleaned and sorted thru some stock materials during Labor Day:

This is 12 kg of silver steel/ drill rod (liberated from the stack of printers in the above post),
that would've cost me some 500 bucks + pp from an online supplier around here:



Bottom row: a few 5 mm, then mainly 6, 8, 10, some odd 11 and a few 12 mm ones at the top.
The longest ones just over 500 mm for comparison, the bulk of them around 350 mm.

Whilst at it, I also found a few chair stands, who were butchered for remelting into 5 kg of AlSi9Cu3 stock:

[Philip Davies]

Very good! I still have a few of those printer rods, wasn’t sure what sort of steel they were, got rid of just a few to the engineers’ group, but came home with most of them! Chair parts I take to the merchants.

[DIYSwede]

AFAIK, the smaller dims below 10 mm are nearly all polished silver steel, which I've successfully hardened in water quench.
The sponge/ rubber coated rollers are mostly BMS only inside, but I've had some unusual finds thru the years:
16 or 18 mm polished (and perhaps honed), hardened massive rollers from the printer platen unit,
they have some really tight tolerances, and I therefore use them for lathe alignment rods and flatness checks.
Guess a few will also be used in an upcoming height gauge project

Now having some 20 kg of drill rod/ SS axles I figure I'll be good for the coming years, health and providence willing.
Retirement looming some 6-7 years away, so I need to stack up with different stock materials and forms,
as well as an electric foundry and casting/ mold equipment.