Ken Scharf ) writes:
This must be the lingering effects of all those Lew McCoy articles I read. I
see a TV, I want to gut it and build ham gear.

As I kid I would explore the neighborhood on my bicycle on the days
the trash went out looking for junk TV sets. I had a set of tools
in my pockets to pull out the chassis and would lug them home to
gut. A friend of mine who lived in a house instead of an apartment
would save the chassis whole in the basement (which bugged the
gas man who had to climb over a mountain of tv chassis to read
the gas meter!).

I'm not a kid, but I still carry tools around. And I think there's
a much better selection and quality of electronic junk being tossed
than when I was a kid.

Back then, over thirty years ago, you'd be lucky to find tv sets
and AC/DC radios. And the heat from the tubes tended to collect
all kinds of junk from the air (or maybe it was mainly because people
tended to keep such things in use for so long) so they were terribly
messy. And of course, the components tended to be big and bulky, though
of course since it was in the late tube-era that's the sort of thing
needed for building anyway.

I was out somewhere yesterday, and came across a monitor that had
a bunch of BNC connectors on it. If I hadn't been trying to get somewhere
on time, I would have taken the time to get them off. As it was, there
was no easy way to get that assembly off, so I left them there. I did pull
two boards off, one digital, to strip down later.

Having the tools is great. You can be selective. When you start out,
most of such equipment can be useful, but as the decades drag on, it's
too much trouble to bring the whole thing home. With tools you can
get the equipment open and extract useful parts right on the spot.
So you can pull the variable capacitors off any radio you see. Or
pop open that computer to pull out any memory. I've been grabbing
switching supplies from computers, partly because they are easy to
extract, and originally because I thought I'd reuse them as power
supplies. But there are more than enough for that, so I've started
pulling the boards out of the boxes when I get home, and using
the boxes for other things.

Michael VE2BVW