Electronics room dwellers dig themselves out of pile of components

About a week ago, John decided it would be a great idea to “liberate” many, many large cardboard boxes and crates of electronic components from a shelf downstairs in the Shed.

This loot basically completely buried the entire electronics room for a week or so. But, intrepid scrap merchants (John, Andy, Dan, Graham, David, Pete) have been going through the stuff, and finished a “first run” through salvaging things which look especially useful (or saleable), and sorted out the rest into eventual junk boxes. There were a huge variety of hand wound coils, optical components, strange military grade motors, miniature gearboxes, and many types of PCB construction dating back as far as the 60’s and including air-wired discrete amplifier circuits (see image), alongside a bevy of potentially useful component stock (we now have several hundred 356 op-amps ;-), so get your project thinking caps on), and a literal crate-full of useful bits of wire. There are still some reasonably tasty looking pots and caps and things on the “scrap” pile that anyone’s welcome to if they fancy some de-soldering hours. Pete has already cast his gaze over the rubble for anything tasty, and everyone else is welcome to do the same – though if you find something especially saleable, we’ll probably nab it to eBay for the MakerSpace – newfangled CO2 laser tubes aren’t free….

This has also caused us to  finally make an effort at  getting up and running the much-awaited MK MakerSpace electronics room inventory system, so all members will be able to see what components we have available for usage in projects: watch this space for details.

Yours from the front line,

Dan W