spare parts source from old dead appliances

Great idea for a thread. I love digging into old appliances to see what makes them work. I will say its a lot easier to take something apart when you aren't worried about putting it back together again.

I took a dead ink-jet printer apart last year for the drive motors. I plan to use the belt drive from the print heads to move a gantry crane one day.  Several useful gear drives that will find a use too.

Sheesh. I threw out a printer a few years ago.

I get a lot of my metric screws from various devices, dead disk drives have a ton of tiny metric screws.

Here too is a person that utilizes parts from pretty much anything headed for the trash.  When I was a young teenager, I used the timer from an old washing machine to run my trains.  It took some experimenting to see which contacts closed and opened as the timer did it's thing.  It turned out pretty cool.  Trains started and stopped, building lights came on and off, and some other home made animations were activated using the same timer.  

My micro-loop inside a vintage TV set's transformer runs for an hour on a toaster oven timer 😁

I love the wash machine controller idea too. The "pull" solinoids for washers are beasts (120v, usually on a relay)

Cameras have very tiny but torquey motors inside...like for an auto lens cover or iris. Disc machines too (DVD/CD/games/etc)

I at least grab the bridge rectifier out of anything "electronic" before pitching it.

The coffee machine also likely has some thermal protection. They look kinda like diodes with a temperature rating on them (usually). Some auto-reset once cool enough, some are a fusible link(usually one of each)