There's always good stuff to have in a junk box, but how does one get it there?

Here are some suggestions of what you can pick up, and what you can get from it:

• Cordless Phones - these are great wonders for the ham to disassemble. Between the handset and base unit, you have a pair of full duplex transceivers, and you can easily score lots of parts from them, or possibly even recycle whole assemblies (FM IF strips? Everyone needs a new microwave receiver...). From one phone, I easily recovered:
  • Relay (for telephone line connection)
  • isolation transformer (telephone line)
  • speaker
  • microphone
  • piezo transducer (used as the ringer on the handset)
  • crystals, various HC-49 (1 useful, in the 10 Mc range)
  And with more effort, One could recover
  • 7-20 IF transformers
  • FM receiver IC's
  • DTMF encoder IC (in my case, it was surface mount, and I was feeling lazy)
  • trimpots (a few)
  • trimcaps (a few, but more worthwhile)
• Televisions - These are beautiful things to behold. Wide band VHF and UHF receiver circuits should make your heart go pitter-pat.
  • High Voltage transformer
  • high voltage capacitors
  • a good number of trimpots
  • modern TV's have a fairly healthy sized switching power supply in them

And where do you, the gentle reader, have opportunity to score such bounty? Well, here are some thoughts on that:

• Electronics repair shops - casually inquire of one of the folks there what they do with the things that they can't fix when the customer doesn't want them. If they just head to the dumpster, maybe you can pick them up with their blessing, or go dumpster-diving without their blessing.
• Electronics retailers - Periodically, customers bring in semi-broken stuff either for warranty service/exchange, or for out of warranty service/replacement. Many times have I seen someone bring in a partly dead cordless phone (low RX audio, for example), to be told that they can have it repaired for $40 + parts and wait 3 weeks, or replace it for $40. What happens to the old one? It's usually left on the counter - "Can you dispose of this for me?" Typically the batteries go into a NiCd recycling program (for the health of the fishies), but the rest of the item is fair game. Again, dumpster diving, or receiving the blessing of management may score you a whole stream of semi-broken stuff with some useable parts.
• Thrift Shops - Most thrift shops accept donations without too many questions. Sadly, this means that many people use them as a dumpster - broken stuff goes to them, and they have no means of fixing it, even if it's a simple repair. If it fails a plug-in test, what happens to it? Does it get tagged as non-working, parts only and put out for sale for $2? (not necessarily a bad deal!) does it get junked? does it get fixed? If it gets junked, you could be able to set up an arrangement where you come by on Thursdays, right before the dumpster-emptiers arrive, and save the nice charity-funding thrift store a few dollars in landfill fees, or you might get a managerial blessing to take them (hey, if you score a lot, you might even consider giving them back some of the "easy fixes" after repair so they can share in your bounty). Otherwise, I'm still convinced that a good dumpster dive is worthwhile. Furthermore - many thrift shops in my area place a mere $1-2 on useful things like working transistor radio sets, which are a good source for telescoping rod antennas, ferrite bars, tuning capacitors, speakers, and IF cans. I did manage to retune an MW stage of one of these up to 900-2000 kc so I could monitor a 160M AM transmitter, and make sure it was working...
• Commercial 2 way radio dealers & service shops - Make a friend of a radio mechanic at any local shop. From time to time, they have to scrap out a radio - and if you're trying to put together a 2 way radio, there's nothing like starting with a 2 way radio! You can sometimes also score speakers, microphones, medium-short hunks of coax... and of course, PARTS of radios. How often have you just wanted a single channel receiver so you can monitor a local repeater or calling frequency without tieing up a transceiver or scanner? Repackaging a receiver stage from a dead TX 2 way radio could get you there.
• Garage sales - broken stuff 50 cents
• Friends, neighbors, relatives old junk equipment (letting people know that you're a ham and will take broken stuff, and sometimes return it if you fix it can score you a lot of parts)
• Other hams with bigger junk boxes - It's funny, periodically people have to downsize their junkboxes (moving, household restructuring (babies, mothers-in-law, or guest room reclamation) or the XYL says "get rid of those boxes of junk or else!"). You saying that you'll be over right away with your pickup truck (or van, or station wagon), and you'll help carry it, and they can come over and visit the junk box when they really need something that they're sure was around there somewere.... can do wonders.