Printer Part Salvaging

One of my hobbies is salvaging parts from inkjet and laserjet printers that end up in the trash. As a result I have never had to buy M3 plastic tapping screws and I’m the proud owner of more than 40lbs of small motors and steel shaft. It’s fun to see what engineering decisions and trade-offs were made between different models, and I try to learn a new design “trick” every time I take a printer apart.


Here is a small selection of some rollers, bushings, and plastic tapping screws I’ve collected. The pink and orange screws are rare! The pile of motors is representative of the larger bin, minus a higher concentration of “tin can” style steppers.



One application where I used small printer rollers was in a custom carriage for a 3D printer with a 210 x 360mm bed. This bed was used to print some origami wheel sheets, which required a longer “Y” axis.




I found a use for a medium sized outrunner BLDC in powering an exhaust fan for an improvised printer enclosure. The fan had a “low” and “high” speed switch wired into the BLDC controller for gentle airflow during printing, and max fume extraction when the printer was done.


In one large multi-color laserjet printer, I found 3 inrunner AMTEK motors. I traced the pinout made a YouTube video on how to control these motors.