Parts that are still usable inside machines people throw away, and the places those machines usually show up.
You can start from a job, from a discarded machine, or from a word on a label. You do not need a part number. Each entry says what the part is, which numbers are typical, and when you should buy a new one instead.
Remove parts from a machine that is already dead. Do not remove the overheat fuse, the door switch, or another safety part from a machine you will plug in again. If a label on your part disagrees with this index, use the label. Confirm the reading with a meter.
A scrapped machine is a box of parts that failed at different times. The reason it was thrown out is often one bad piece. The motor, the cord, the supply, and the screws are frequently still good. This index says which is which.
- 1. Name the job or the machine. A microwave is a donor, which means the discarded machine. The slow motor under the glass plate is a part.
- 2. Read the color as a status. Green means take that part first. Red means the part is present and you should leave it. A color dot marks a category.
- 3. Use the part in your hand as the spec. Tables describe the common version. The label on your part is the specification for that unit.
Parts 104
- Brushed DC motor9 donors · Rebuild shelfTwo wires, a commutator, and a permanent-magnet stator. The most reusable motor in household trash, and also the easiest one to mis-voltage.
- DC gearmotor4 donors · Rebuild shelfA brushed or brushless motor already fitted with a gearbox. Torque is the point. The ratio is almost never printed on the toy ones.
- Universal motor3 donors · Rebuild shelfA series-wound motor that runs on AC or DC and spins very fast. Vacuums, blenders, drills, shredders, sewing machines. Loud, and happy to overspeed if you remove the load.
- Shaded-pole motor4 donors · Rebuild shelfThe simplest AC motor: a squirrel cage and a copper shading ring that makes it start. Desk fans, bathroom fans, microwave stirrer fans, older fridge fans. Low torque, nearly immortal, inefficient.
- Single-phase induction motor4 donors · Rebuild shelfThe workhorse in washers, dryers, furnace blowers, and larger fans. Often needs a start or run capacitor. The capacitor value is printed on the old can; do not guess it.
- Brushless DC motor7 donors · Bench electronicsThree-phase windings and an electronic commutator that you must supply. Excellent life. Useless as a two-wire motor unless you keep the driver it came with.
- Stepper motor4 donors · Bench electronicsMoves a known angle per pulse. Older printers, scanners, and floppy drives are where the good ones are. Many new inkjets switched to brushed DC plus an encoder strip.
- Vibration motor2 donors · Rebuild shelfA tiny brushed motor with an offset mass, or a linear resonant actuator in newer phones. The most reliable small motor in a phone, because the phone was not thrown out for a dead vibrator.
- AC synchronous gearmotor1 donors · Rebuild shelfA mains-frequency motor with a gearbox already attached. Microwave turntables are the classic: a few RPM, surprising torque, runs all day.
- Solenoid4 donors · Rebuild shelfA coil and a sliding slug. Stroke is short, force drops fast with distance, and AC coils overheat on DC even when the voltage number matches.
- Solenoid water valve2 donors · Rebuild shelfA pilot-operated valve: a small coil opens a diaphragm and line pressure does the real work. Many need a minimum pressure to open fully. The coil voltage is printed and is often mains.
- Small pump5 donors · Rebuild shelfAppliance pumps are real pumps, usually at mains voltage. Inkjet peristaltic pumps are the low-voltage exception and are kind to whatever is in the tube.
- Axial fan7 donors · Bench electronicsA framed fan that already solves mounting. PC fans are the standard. The dead ones are dead because of the bearing, which you cannot economically rebuild.
- Blower (centrifugal fan)1 donors · Bench electronicsMoves air against more pressure than an axial fan of the same size. Laptop blowers, projector fans, some vacuum heads, hair-dryer style impellers.
- Hard-drive voice coil1 donors · Bench electronicsA flat coil between two neodymium magnets. It is a linear motor with a very short stroke, and a passable haptic or galvo. It is a bad speaker and a worse place to put continuous DC.
- Microswitch8 donors · Rebuild shelfA snap-action switch with a real mechanical life. The one in a mouse is the best cheap switch most people will ever hold. Door interlocks in microwaves are the heavy mains-rated cousins.
- Mechanical keyswitch1 donors · Bench electronicsOnly worth pulling from an actual mechanical keyboard. Membrane keyboards do not contain these, no matter how 'clicky' the marketing was.
- Tactile switch13 donors · Rebuild shelfThe little click button on a monitor bezel, a meter, a toy. Membrane pads and conductive-rubber remotes are the worse version: they work, but the carbon pills wear out.
- Panel switch14 donors · Rebuild shelfA human-sized switch. Tool triggers are often a switch plus a potentiometer. Car switches are 12 V and stamped with a current that assumes a lamp or a relay, not a starter.
- Safety interlock5 donors · Rebuild shelfA switch whose job was to stop a machine from running with the guard open. Reuse the switch in a new machine. Do not bypass the one that is still in a working microwave, washer, or shredder.
- Thermal fuse6 donors · Rebuild shelfA one-shot link that opens at a stamped temperature and stays open. It is why a lot of dryers, kettles, and hair dryers are in the trash. The element is often still good. The fuse opened because something else was wrong.
- Bimetal thermostat6 donors · Rebuild shelfA disc that snaps open at a temperature and, on the cycling types, snaps shut again as it cools. Kettle steam-stats, dryer cycling thermostats, coffee makers, water-heater thermostats.
- NTC thermistor5 donors · Bench electronicsResistance falls as it gets hotter. Two different parts share the name: a small sensor bead, and a big inrush limiter on a power supply that is meant to run hot.
- Optical interrupter2 donors · Bench electronicsAn LED and a phototransistor facing each other across a slot. Printers and scanners use them as home sensors. More repeatable than a mechanical switch, and already mounted in a little plastic flag.
- Signal relay1 donors · Bench electronicsA small relay from a board: 5 V or 12 V coil, contacts that switch an amp or two. Fine for logic-level loads. Not a motor relay just because it clicks.
- Power relay / contactor6 donors · Rebuild shelfContacts that can actually switch a heater, a motor, or a pump. Found on appliance boards, HVAC, window AC, UPS, and garage-door openers. Coil voltage and contact rating are both mandatory reading.
- Automotive ISO relay1 donors · Rebuild shelfThe standard 12 V relay. Pin numbers are an industry habit: 85 and 86 are the coil, 30 is common, 87 is normally open, 87a is normally closed if it exists.
- Reed switch0 donors · Bench electronicsTwo ferromagnetic contacts in a glass tube that close when a magnet is near. Alarm sensors, laptop lids (sometimes a hall sensor instead), some float switches.
- Switch-mode wall supply15 donors · Bench electronicsThe correct way to get low voltage from the trash: keep the whole sealed brick. Opening one to harvest a controller is rarely worth the loss of a working supply.
- ATX computer supply1 donors · Bench electronicsThe highest-current multi-rail supply in ordinary trash. Also a mains device with a primary capacitor that stays charged. Use it as a supply, or harvest the fan and the hardware, but do not treat the open board as a toy.
- Iron transformer4 donors · Rebuild shelfHeavy, inefficient, and kind. An old linear wall wart or a stereo transformer gives you isolated low-voltage AC and can survive abuse that kills a switcher. Weight is the tell against a switch-mode brick.
- Doorbell transformer1 donors · Rebuild shelfA small hardwired transformer, often 8, 16, or 24 VAC at 10–30 VA, mounted near the panel or in the chime. One of the few legitimate low-voltage AC sources in a house.
- Bridge rectifier3 donors · Bench electronicsFour diodes in a package or as four discrete diodes. Turns AC into pulsating DC. The big square ones on supplies have a current and a voltage printed; the SMD ones on a dead board often do not.
- Electrolytic capacitor2 donors · Bench electronicsThe part that dries out and kills supplies. Secondary-side caps that still measure well are worth keeping. Primary-side mains caps belong in the original design or in the bin, not in a new mains supply you are inventing.
- Film capacitor3 donors · Rebuild shelfThe plastic-film can that starts a motor or sits across a line as an X capacitor. Motor run capacitors are genuinely useful and genuinely mains. Safety-class X and Y parts are not generic capacitors.
- Power inductor3 donors · Bench electronicsA coil used as energy storage in a switcher, or as a choke. Motherboard VRM inductors are easy to desolder and are often marked with the inductance (1R0 means 1.0 µH, R47 means 0.47 µH).
- Ferrite core2 donors · Rebuild shelfThe clip-on cylinder on a cable, the rod in an AM radio, the cores in a supply. Useful as common-mode noise suppression and as material for people who wind their own. The mix number is almost never known on salvage.
- Heatsink1 donors · Rebuild shelfAluminum from a supply, a monitor, an amplifier, a set-top box. The thermal interface pad is single-use. Clean it off and use a proper pad or grease when you remount.
- Fuse5 donors · Rebuild shelfA fuse is a specified weak link. The salvage rule is to read the current, the voltage, and whether it is fast or slow. A fuse that is the wrong speed will either nuisance-open or fail to protect.
- Power MOSFET0 donors · Bench electronicsWorth pulling only when the part number is readable and you look it up. Motherboard FETs are often marked with a short code, not the full part number, and the code is a rabbit hole.
- Schottky diode0 donors · Bench electronicsA low-drop diode used as the output rectifier in older supplies and as a polarity guard. Useful when marked. The drop is lower than a 1N4007, which is the point, and the leakage is higher.
- Optocoupler0 donors · Bench electronicsAn LED and a phototransistor in one package, used so a supply can regulate across the isolation barrier. A PC817-class 4-pin opto is one of the few ICs worth desoldering, because the pinout is standard and the part is robust.
- Linear regulator1 donors · Bench electronicsA three-terminal regulator. 7805 (5 V, ~1 A, needs about 7 V in) and AMS1117-3.3 (SOT-223, dropout around a volt, needs capacitors close by) are the ones you can actually reuse. They turn excess voltage into heat.
- LED constant-current driver3 donors · Bench electronicsLEDs want current, not a random voltage. The driver is the part that does that. Backlight drivers produce tens of volts at a regulated current. Flashlight boards based on the AMC7135 are linear 350 mA sinks and can be stacked.
- Cylindrical lithium-ion cell6 donors · Bench electronicsThe energy-storage prize in modern trash, and the fire. Tool packs, e-bike and scooter packs, good laptop packs, some vacuums. A pack is discarded because one series group is weak. The rest might be fine, which you prove by testing, not by hoping.
- Lithium pouch cell4 donors · Bench electronicsA soft lithium cell. Energy density is good and the mechanical protection is a plastic bag. Phone and laptop packs, Bluetooth speakers, headphones. Swollen means the cell has already generated gas. It is end of life.
- NiMH cell2 donors · Rebuild shelfThe usual cell in solar garden lights and older toothbrushes and cordless phones. Garden-light cells have usually been left flat and are the reason the light died. Corded-phone packs are sometimes still good.
- Sealed lead-acid battery1 donors · Rebuild shelfThe 12 V 7 Ah or 9 Ah block inside a small UPS, or a larger one in a bigger UPS. Very often the UPS was thrown out because this battery is already dead. Lead and acid, even when 'sealed'.
- Coin cell5 donors · Rebuild shelfThe CMOS battery on a motherboard and the cell in a remote, a scale, a bike computer. CR2032 is 3 V lithium, 20 mm. Holders are more useful than a half-dead cell.
- Battery management board3 donors · Bench electronicsThe small board in a pack that cuts off on overcharge, overdischarge, and overcurrent. Sometimes it balances, sometimes it only protects, sometimes the tool does it and this board is just a thermistor and a connector. Read which one you have before you trust it with loose cells.
- Charger module3 donors · Bench electronicsA TP4056-style single-cell charger shows up in cheap Bluetooth speakers and power banks. Tool chargers are a matched pair with that tool's pack voltage. Neither is a universal lithium charger.
- Battery clip and holder5 donors · Rebuild shelfThe 9 V snap from a smoke alarm or a dead toy, the AA box from a radio, the spring tube from a flashlight. Mechanically dull and constantly useful.
- Load cell1 donors · Bench electronicsThe aluminum bar in a digital kitchen scale is a real load cell, and new ones cost more than the scale did. Output is millivolts, not a 0–5 V signal. Bathroom scales are four separate half-bridges that have to be combined.
- Infrared remote receiver3 donors · Bench electronicsThe three-pin can in the corner of a TV, a set-top box, a DVD player, or a soundbar. It already demodulates the 38 kHz carrier. The output is a logic pulse train, active low, not a raw photodiode.
- Infrared LED4 donors · Rebuild shelfThe clear or dark LED in a remote control. Typically 940 nm. Invisible, so a phone camera is the test instrument. A remote LED expects pulses, not a DC current from a 9 V battery.
- Phototransistor2 donors · Bench electronicsThe receive half of a garage-door safety beam, an optical interrupter, a printer encoder, or a sunlight sensor. A phototransistor leaks more current as light rises. It is not the same part as a 38 kHz remote receiver.
- Hall sensor1 donors · Bench electronicsSenses a magnetic field. Laptop lids, BLDC motors, scooter throttles, some washing-machine drum sensors. Analog halls (throttle) and switch halls (lid) are different, and the pinout of a 3-pin SOT-23 is not something to guess from color.
- Electret microphone2 donors · Bench electronicsThe little can in headsets, webcams, cameras, and old phones. Two pads, needs a bias resistor to a quiet supply (typically 2–5 V through 2.2 kΩ). It is not a speaker and it is not a MEMS mic on a flex, though those are also worth keeping as a module.
- Piezo horn2 donors · Rebuild shelfThe ear-splitting disc in a photoelectric smoke alarm. Often three pins: drive, feedback, and ground, because the transistor that makes it oscillate is outside the horn, on the board. Two-pin types are self-contained and just want DC.
- Piezo disc1 donors · Bench electronicsA brass disc with a ceramic layer. In musical cards and as a knock sensor it is a high-impedance pickup. In an ultrasonic humidifier it is a different part, driven at about 1.7 MHz by its own board, and it will not beep if you put 5 V DC on it.
- Quadrature encoder1 donors · Bench electronicsTwo out-of-phase switches or optical sensors. The mouse wheel is the common one. Direction comes from which channel leads. Resolution is coarse, which is fine for a knob and useless for a CNC axis.
- Linear encoder strip1 donors · Bench electronicsThe clear plastic ribbon in an inkjet, printed with fine dark lines, read by an optical sensor on the carriage. It is a real linear scale. Fingerprints and creases destroy it.
- Pressure switch1 donors · Rebuild shelfA diaphragm and a snap switch, used in washers to know the water level. Usually a hose port and one or more clicks at different heights. Not a transducer: it is a threshold.
- Float switch2 donors · Rebuild shelfA float with a magnet and a reed, or a simple buoy that pushes a microswitch. Dishwashers, humidifiers, dehumidifiers, aquarium gear, bilge pumps.
- Tilt switch1 donors · Rebuild shelfHeaters use a tip-over switch so they die when they fall over. Newer ones are a mechanical ball or a pendulum. Older ones are a glass capsule of mercury. Mercury goes to hazardous waste, intact, not into the parts bin.
- Pressure sensor1 donors · Bench electronicsThe transducer in a blood-pressure monitor or a weather gadget, as opposed to a switch. Often a small ported package plus an amplifier. Without the part number it is an analog voltage you can calibrate, not a known kPa/V.
- Potentiometer5 donors · Rebuild shelfA resistive divider with a knob. Volume pots, trim pots on boards, the trigger of a cordless tool, the stick of a gamepad. Gamepad sticks are often discarded because this part drifted. Test before you keep a stick.
- Speaker driver10 donors · Rebuild shelfA coil, a magnet, and a cone. TVs and stereo speakers are the ones worth mounting. Laptop and phone speakers are fine as alarms and poor as music. Read the impedance before you parallel two of them.
- Indicator LED12 donors · Rebuild shelfThe ordinary indicator. Through-hole LEDs from old boards are worth a jar. SMD 0603s are not, unless you enjoy tweezers. Polarity matters and there is always a series resistor in any honest circuit.
- LED array or COB5 donors · Bench electronicsMany LEDs in series on aluminum board, from a bulb, a flashlight, or a TV backlight. You do not power these from 12 V because 'LEDs are 12 V sometimes'. Count the series junctions or measure the string voltage from the original driver.
- Laser diode0 donors · Bench electronicsThe diode in a CD, DVD, or Blu-ray pickup. DVD decks usually contain a red diode near 650 nm and an infrared diode near 780 nm. Blu-ray adds violet near 405 nm. In the player it is Class 1 because of the optics and the driver. Out of the player, overdriven, it is an eye hazard, and the infrared one is invisible.
- Small solar cell2 donors · Rebuild shelfThe cell from a garden light is usually a few square centimetres and about 2 V open-circuit in sun, sized to charge one NiMH cell through the chip. Calculator cells are lower current and more fragile. Neither will run a motor directly in any useful way.
- Vacuum fluorescent display2 donors · Keep the moduleThe blue-green display in DVD players, microwaves, and older car stereos. Beautiful, and a poor salvage: it wants a filament supply around 3 V AC and a negative grid drive of tens of volts. The driver chip is part of the display, practically.
- LCD panel2 donors · Keep the moduleThe glass is the expensive part of a monitor. It is reusable only if you write down the model number printed on the metal back (a string like M270HVN02) and match it to a controller board. The scaler that came with the TV is usually not that controller.
- Tubular heating element4 donors · Rebuild shelfA nichrome coil inside a metal sheath, packed in mineral insulation. Kettles, ovens, water heaters, some space heaters. The failure that matters is leakage from the wire to the sheath, not just an open circuit.
- Nichrome wire4 donors · Rebuild shelfBare resistance wire, usually wound on mica in a hair dryer or a toaster. It runs at mains voltage in the donor. It will sag, oxidize, and start a fire if you reuse it without a ceramic support and a thermal cutout.
- PTC heater1 donors · Rebuild shelfA ceramic element whose resistance rises with temperature, so it limits its own power. Found in some space heaters, car mirror defoggers, and glue guns. Safer than bare nichrome, and still not safe to bury in a couch.
- USB cable7 donors · Rebuild shelfA power cord for 5 V, until it is a data cable, until it is a USB-C cable that does not have the data pairs or the e-marker you assumed. The failures are at the strain relief. Cut the plug off a tired cable and you still have wire; you do not have a reliable data cable.
- Barrel jack2 donors · Rebuild shelfThe round plug on routers, guitar pedals, and laptop supplies. The two common bores are 2.1 mm and 2.5 mm, both in a 5.5 mm shell, and they almost fit each other, which is how center pins get bent. Center-positive is usual and not universal.
- Mains cord9 donors · Rebuild shelfA cord with a known insulation rating is a mains cord. Ethernet is not. Speaker wire is not. The IEC C13 lead from a PC and the C7 'figure-8' from a radio are the useful, reusable ones, because the appliance end is standardized.
- Signal and hookup wire4 donors · Rebuild shelfCopper with ordinary insulation, harvested from ethernet, telephone, USB, and the low-voltage harness of a dead machine. Ethernet is the best of them: twisted, plenty of it, decent copper.
- Antenna pigtail1 donors · Keep the moduleThe tiny coaxial lead from a router or laptop Wi-Fi card to its antenna. The connector is the useful part if you work on radios. The antenna is a length of wire tuned for 2.4 GHz, not a general-purpose aerial.
- Pin header and connector2 donors · Bench electronicsThe 0.1 in pin headers on a motherboard, fan plugs, and the countless white connectors in appliances. A matching pair salvaged together is a connector. One side, alone, is a puzzle.
- Flat flex cable1 donors · Keep the moduleThe orange or brown film cable in a phone, a printer carriage, a laptop keyboard. Conductor pitch is 0.5 mm or 1.0 mm and the contact side is specific. They crease once and then the trace is open.
- 3.5 mm audio jack2 donors · Rebuild shelfThe headphone connector. TRS is stereo. TRRS adds a microphone and the pinout is not universal: CTIA and OMTP swap the last two rings. A jack salvaged from a known headset can be mapped once and labeled.
- Inductive charge coil2 donors · Bench electronicsA flat coil used to couple power across a small gap. Toothbrush docks and Qi pads. The coil without its tuning capacitors and driver is just an inductor. Keep the pair of coils if you want the link to keep working.
- Neodymium magnet5 donors · Rebuild shelfThe strongest magnet a normal person will ever pull out of the trash. A 3.5 in hard drive has two nickel-plated arcs on steel keepers. They pinch skin, they shatter if they slam, and they are effectively permanent at room temperature.
- Timing belt6 donors · Rebuild shelfPrinters and scanners are full of toothed belts. Some are a common pitch you can match to a pulley you already own, and some are a proprietary tooth. Stretch and glazed teeth mean the belt was the failure.
- Linear shaft3 donors · Rebuild shelfThe ground steel rod a printer carriage or a scanner head rides on. Straighter and smoother than hardware-store rod. Diameters are often 6, 8, 10, or 12 mm, and 'often' is not a measurement.
- Bearing and bushing1 donors · Rebuild shelfSmall ball bearings from printers, fans, skate wheels, and appliances. Fan bearings are usually the part that failed. Printer and scanner bearings are often fine. Hard-drive spindle bearings are fluid-dynamic and not a separable part you can press into a new design.
- Gears7 donors · Rebuild shelfPrinters, toys, and tool transmissions. Plastic gears with a broken tooth are why the machine was scrapped; the other gears in the train may be perfect. Module and pressure angle are rarely marked. Keep a meshing pair together.
- Spring5 donors · Rebuild shelfPrinters, battery contacts, mechanisms of every kind. A spring with no rate is still a spring you can try. Label where it came from if the machine might be reassembled.
- Screws and standoffs5 donors · Rebuild shelfLaptop screws are tiny and specific (often M2 and M2.5). PC standoffs and optical-drive screws are M3. Printers mix plastic bosses with self-tappers. A mixed jar is how you strip a laptop boss. Bag them by donor.
- Enclosure17 donors · Rebuild shelfA box that already has cable holes is a project enclosure. PC cases are the large end, router shells the small end, speaker cabinets the acoustic end. Metal ones are also a ground and a heatsink, if you use them that way on purpose.
- Heat pipe2 donors · Bench electronicsA sealed copper tube that moves heat by boiling a little fluid at one end and condensing at the other. Laptop and GPU coolers. It is not a copper rod you can cut, bend sharply, or drill. The working fluid is small but the vacuum is the whole function.
- Lens and optical glass4 donors · Rebuild shelfReal glass from cameras, projectors, scanners, and overhead-projector Fresnels. Coatings are soft. A Fresnel from an old overhead projector is a large, light lens and also a way to start a fire if you leave it in the sun.
- USB webcam2 donors · Keep the moduleIf a computer enumerates it as a camera, stop. That module is worth more than any chip inside it. Laptop internal cameras are often USB and often still UVC, sometimes on a tiny daughterboard with the microphone.
- Amplifier board2 donors · Keep the moduleThe board in a set of powered speakers or a Bluetooth speaker, between the input jack and the drivers. Often a class-D chip that is happier left on its board with its inductors than desoldered into a project.
- Bluetooth audio module1 donors · Keep the moduleThe small board in a Bluetooth speaker that takes the radio and outputs analog audio, sometimes with the amplifier on the same board. Reusable if you can find power, ground, and the speaker outputs. Not a general Bluetooth serial link unless the chip is one of the rare configurable modules.
- SATA-USB bridge2 donors · Keep the moduleThe board in an external hard-drive enclosure that turns a SATA drive into a USB device. One of the most straightforward modules in consumer trash. The drive may be dead and the board fine, or the reverse.
- Wi-Fi card3 donors · Keep the moduleThe card in a laptop, with antenna jacks. It is a replacement part for another laptop of the same era, not a hobby radio. Mini PCIe and M.2 A/E key are the common shapes and they do not fit the same slot.
- USB barcode scanner1 donors · Keep the moduleMost handheld barcode scanners from an office cleanout show up to a computer as a keyboard. You plug them in and they type the code followed by enter. That is a finished instrument, not a pile of parts.
- Treadmill motor controller1 donors · Keep the moduleThe board that turns mains into a variable high-voltage DC for the treadmill motor. Makers use the pair as a lathe or a grinder drive. It is not a bench supply, and the motor is often 90–130 V DC at high current.
- BLDC controller4 donors · Keep the moduleThe board that commutates a brushless motor. In a cordless tool, a scooter, a fan, or a washer. It is matched to that motor's voltage, current, and hall wiring. Keep the pair. A hoverboard controller is a dual ESC for two hub motors and is a known hobby part only if you use the documented firmware path — the stock firmware expects foot pads.
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