What not to do - Printers - Page 2

Thanks, this is helpful. I just picked up about 40 printers last week. Wasn't sure what to do with them.

forget the star tips, a straight claw estwing will strip one down in no time flat

I take them apart, 10-15 min easy. The motors and stuff add up.

Took apart an old color laserjet awhile back, weighed around 50 lbs. Lots of metal, 4 big toner carts, boards, wire, lost track of the number of small stepper/clutch motors I yanked from it but there were at least 5.

My first big pick was about 30+ computers and 40+ printers, copiers and scanners, mostly old stuff from the 90s. Computers were great. Lots of pentium chips and a dozen 486s. Broke all the computers down and sent 141lbs to ewasted. Still waiting for them to go through the shipment. Now the work begins with the printers. There are a couple of old heavy mita's. I think they must weigh close to 100 lbs each. Can't wait to see what's in them.

I sell my working printers to this printer repair/sales guy by my house. He only buys certain printers but at least I can sell some of them first. Its always nice to have a buyer lined up to save you time.

The broken printers, I just take out the cartridges, cut the cords off, and recycle the rest @ .05/lb ewaste. I found that with printers you loose a lot of weight in the plastic that you throw away and the bigger printers are a lot more time consumer than other e-waste. You can sometimes double your money by breaking down larger printers but, it just doesnt seem worth the time compared to the break down of other items such as TVs.

Yep, agree with RCA gojo is the best

Who is Gojo? is he on this forum or is it a website?

Originally Posted by mrsamsonite

Who is Gojo? is he on this forum or is it a website?

Gojo is a hand cleaner

Originally Posted by mikeinreco

Found in a printer

nice board. maybe I should think about at least breaking down the good ones.

I hate inkjets. Laser printers are fun. Alot of the screws from laserjet are stainless. So are some of the rods. The stepper motor in laserjets is easy to take apart if you have snap ring pliers. Then you can remove the copper from it. The engine boards have copper inductors you can pull off. This is a low grade board in the bottom of the printer.

dot matrix printers are easy to take apart and have a large transformer, nice motor inside. Boards usually have some gold worth pulling.

snap ring pliers

About the only thing in escrap not worth pulling apart is the motors in cd/dvd drives. Just yank the board, rest shred. Other is hard drives. Not worth the time. Throw them on Ebay and make a 1.25 lb and they pay shipping lol... Although save and test the large capacity drives and sell them as good working lots.

Everything else is gutted....