Looking for Hints & Tips

[ShugsParticipant @shugs]

Hi, has anyone successfully recovered the rods from the likes of these? They are from ink jet printers, rubber rollers appear to be bonded on and the larger plastic ones may be glued on. Any advice would be most welcome. Thanks Shugs

[Nick WheelerParticipant @nickwheeler]

I’d use a hammer to beat the various bits off.

 

If I was mental enough to not just buy some 6/8/whatever rod.

 

I did dismantle a printer some time go, but the amount of usable material acquired isn’t worth the time.

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

Yes have done this before and on some bigger printers and the stuff is lovely to machine, albeit sometimes in odd sizes

[JAParticipant @ja]

It seems that every participant of this forum other than me has recovered stuff from printers. I just take the junk printer to the local recycling centre.

The plastic rollers may be of use but the rods could be anything (obviously not). If you are lucky they could be a nice machinable stainless steel. If not, they could a nasty stainless or chrome plated mild steel.

Boiling water may break the glue if it is a Cyanoacrylate.

JA

[mark costello 1Participant @markcostello1]

Have a  lathe? Just get close to the diameter and it usually rolls off.

[Ian PParticipant @ianp]

The plastic disks can be drifted off if you stand the shaft over a washer sitting on the vice just wider than the rod diameter. Most likely you will find that the shaft is straight knurled in each roller position but it is still a very useful, (easily machinable) grade of steel.

Rubber wheels are glued or bonded and not easy to remove but you could try VERY tightly compressing the bush across its diameter in the vice and sliding a stanley on the shaft and slice off a lump to see what lies beneath.

Modern domestic grade printers contain a very limited amount of reusable material and nowadays don’t make rich pickings. Older laser printers, especially early HP models are an engineering treasure trove with substantial construction and lots of steel and brass gears.

I have never found any stainless or difficult to machine shaft in the ten or twenty printers I have cannibalised.

Ian P

 

[Ian P]

On Ian P Said:

…
I have never found any stainless or difficult to machine shaft in the ten or twenty printers I have cannibalised.

Ian P

 

I have, but only one!   It came out of an early HP Inkjet, not cheap, that also yielded a number of brass blocks.  I guess the blocks were an anti-vibration measure, necessary because the design wasn’t quite right.

Goodness knows what this particular rod is made of.  Induction hardened Chrome plated rod is about as hard as HSS,  but this stuff resists carbide!

Must be the exception that proves the rule, because all the other rods salvaged from printers and scanners machine well.

I’m still investigating why some of my posts add blank lines at the end.   First suspect was the edit window expander button, dotted arrow in the corner, which I often use on my big-screen workstation:

Doesn’t seem to be that though.  Another mystery!

Dave

[Ian PParticipant @ianp]

But no blank lines added to your last post!

Ian P

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Some of the rubber rollers might simply be pressed on, and I have managed to remove them where that was the case.

I made suspension “springs” for the hornblocks on my workshop hoist, essentially a six-foot gauge 4-wheel truck, by slicing such rollers, but as others say, the more modern the printer or scanner the less useful it is for materials.

You could try drifting rollers and gears off but that does risk bending what started as dead-straight bar. It’s probably better and easier to sacrifice those fittings by knifing or turning them off. Try boiling water to break any adhesive bond.

 

I had to scrap an HP A3-size printer not long ago. The amount of metal including screws, etc. in it was surprisingly small; and only a small proportion of that was worth keeping. The rest went to the local skip yard, though only once I’d also accumulated enough gardening “swarf” to make the trip worth the petrol.

[VicParticipant @vic]

I’ve reclaimed the steel from stuff like this. Not sure how I got the bits off now though. I won’t bother in future as I was hoping they might be stainless, but they weren’t. Good luck with the reclamation though!

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