How to Save Some Money By Salvaging Electronic Parts From Junk Electronic Boards

If you have the chance to visit any electronic repair shop you would be surprise to see almost all of them are keeping electronic boards either at the side or corner of the repair workshop or in a store room. You may be wonder why they are keeping all those electronic boards. For those who are not in this repair line you would think that the junk electronic boards are no use and should be thrown away. But to those who already in this repair field they found that all these boards are like a “Gem” to them. Why? Because many electronic parts found in the boards sometimes you could not even get it from the market be in local or from other countries thus they would treasure these kind of boards very much.

Not only that sometimes those electronic components salvaged from good brand of equipment have higher quality than those you bought from local market. Although the junk electronic boards may have taken up some of the repair space it is worth to keep some of them just in case you could not get parts from electronic suppliers. Besides, those boards could save some of your money and time instead of purposely driving to the centre of town just to get that replacement parts-it is not economical! Remember that if you repair Television then keep Television junk board and not modem board, Fax machine board, Air condition control board and etc-hope you get the idea. Just keep those boards that are related to your repair field. Okay, here I will just list some of the parts that might be useful:

Monitor Flyback Transformer

If you are in the CRT Monitor repair field I’m sure you have come across problem with display blur (14” and 15” Monitor) and the cause was the bad flyback divider. If you could get the original flyback transformer or even a Monitor blur buster then that’s fine. What if you could not get these two parts? Well you can always salvage a working flyback transformer from a junk Monitor board and modify it to work as a replacement of the flyback divider. Just cut off the 10 pins of the flyback and apply epoxy as shown from the photo, cutting and modifying the focus and screen wire of the original flyback with the replacement flyback will put your Monitor to work again. Always take precaution when comes to this kind of modification.

Anode Cap

Many technicians do not know that actually the anode cap can be use as a replacement for the tip of the desoldering tool (sucker). Normally for a sucker, if you have heavily used it, the most the front tip it can last was about few months time. Then you got to get a new one and after few months time, again you have to replace the front tip. In order to solve this problem, just cut out part of the anode cap as shown from the photo and put it on and cover the original tip. With the use of the anode cap material, the tip would not melt easily as this material could withstand high temperature from the solder gun. Hope this tip is useful for you.

Wires from transformer and CRT yoke coils

If you repair CRT Monitor, you would have come across burnt B+ coil and it is very difficult to get the replacement. The replacement may have less inductance, less loop or even too big to be installed in the board. The best is to loop back the burnt coil. You can either buy a new wire that has the same length or diameter or you can use wire from inductors, transformers/CRT yoke coils. Remove the burnt wire and re-loop with the wire that you have salvaged from the components. I have done that many times and it worked perfectly okay.

Wires

Sometime in electronic repair you are not only required to replace/change components only you may also need to do some cut and paste job. Electronic equipment that was struck by lightning normally may have lots of broken/torn circuit track. Since the copper circuit track is beyond repairable, the only way to repair or to joint it is to use wire. Do you know that junk electronic boards have many different type, size and colour of wires? Just use those wires and make a connection between the two points. I always have some wires salvaged from the junk boards in my workbench drawer.  If you fix certain electronic project kits you may require some wires to do the job and the junk electronic boards are one of the source of the wires.

Electronic Components

There are tons of electronic components that you can salvage from the junk electronic board besides the one that have mentioned above such as Electrolytic Capacitors, Transistors, ICs, ICs socket, Resistors, Diodes, Zener Diodes, Optoisolator IC, Inductors, Microswitch, Variable Resistor, Preset, Posistor, CRT Socket, Relay, Fuse, Bridge Rectifier and etc. Don’t think that all these are useless components in a junk board and in fact some of the components have a better quality as compare with the one you bought from some electronic suppliers. It depends on what type of board that the components were salvaged. You would be surprise how much you have saved instead of getting new components from the market. Of course if you can’t find the components from the junk board, the only way is to get new parts from the electronic distributors.

What if I’m not in the Monitor Repairing field?

You may have ask what if I not in the Monitor repairing field? Need not worry as this article is just an idea of how anyone in any electronic repair field could do the same thing as me. Just salvage those components in your type of electronic board and you are the one who know which parts that you should keep and which parts that you should discard. For example, you could salvage the fan in the computer power supply and place it onto the technical table and power the fan with 12 Volt DC and you got a small ventilator fan that can help to suck out the fumes when you are doing the soldering work.

Where are we going to store the electronic parts salvaged from the junk boards?

I’ve been to many electronic repair shops and found that many of them did not have a proper place to store those parts. I found many components scattered around the technical place and the places were messy too and one could easily confuse whether if that component is bad or good. Of course you can always test all of the components there but what if there are hundreds of them? It may take you some time to segregate the bad and the good components. Why not do it right at the first time and you can rest assured there would be no more of mixing up good and the bad components.

What you need to do is to buy the electronic component storage compartment and label the entire plastic box in it. Put a sticker on every box with the word such as zener diode (2.4V, 5.1V, 12V and etc), IC, transistor, diode, resistor, relay, PTC, coil, capacitor, voltage regulator and etc. You can arrange or categorize the components in a row or column-it’s your preference.

Although this may take up some your time (may be 1 or 2 days) and money, let me tell you this-it is worth the effort to set up one. You will no longer simply place your components and whatever you have salvaged you can easily identify which box in the compartment to which components. If you can’t afford the storage compartment rack, just make sure your technical department is neat and tidy and keep all the components in a big box. Once you have accumulated some money, then you can buy the storage compartment and fill it with the salvaged parts.

Conclusion- If you are serious in running a repair business, please set a side some set of junk electronic boards (boards that related to your repair field) that is ready to be salvaged and you would not know when you gonna you use it. When you really need it you would tell yourself that you have no regret in keeping them. Keeping those boards not necessary equals to liability it can be your gain too as you can compare the circuitry and components (if have) for troubleshooting purposes. Always make sure that you do arrange those boards in a good location otherwise it would be an eye sore if customers see it. Do not keep too many until it taken up too much of your working space. Well that’s it for this month repair newsletter and will send again next month-See You Next Year!

Click here If You Want To Become A Professional In Testing Electronic Components

Click here If You Want To Become A Professional In LCD Monitor Repair

Recommended LCD TV repair membership website by Mr Kent

Recomended Plasma TV repair membership website by Mr Kent