Electronic Junk - What to salvage and what to leave for good?

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With the technology that we have now one should expect the plain old IC’s to be dirt cheap, but component prices are increasing every other day. And I can only think of one reason to account for this trend-reversal --- Hobbyists.

Industries don’t use these large form factor ICs (through-hole packages) ..they’ve moved on to smaller and more efficient SMD packages. So assumably the production of regular components have dropped. Presently, their only market is perhaps hobbyists and small scale hardware manufacturing units. This might be fuelling the price surge. Hobbyists aren’t going to easily switch to SMD as handling them is quite cumbersome.
So what do you do in such situations? Salvage parts from old junk ofc!

⚠️ Ensure that the device is unplugged and beware of capacitors, the big ones - they are deadly! If you are unsure about something it’s always safer to google it and then proceed. ⚠️

The first step would be to unscrew everything carefully and then start hunting. That’s how I usually do it. So here are the list of things that I usually salvage alongwith the components that are probably not worth your time. The things you should salvage will beGreen and those you should never will be the Red ones. The other colours are for parts that lie in between and it’s value varies from user to user.

Resistors

There’s no point in salvaging resistors. They are easily available and cheap and most often it’s hard to use them without long enough leads. If you find big wire wound resistors or resistors in a large form factor. They can be salvaged. You can use them as fixed loads to test your power supply designs. Also remove all types of trimmers and potentiometers. They are always useful.

Capacitors

All the small disk or radial capacitors are not worth your time. They’re dirt cheap and needn’t be salvaged. Big electrolytic capacitors and polyester film based capacitors are useful.

⚠️ Ensure that the capacitor is discharged - You can do this simply by shorting the leads of the capacitor with a conductor. If it is a huge capacitor, don’t try the above method - sparks caused can even melt the metal.

However you’ll find variable capacitors in old radios and devices that have a tuning circuit. Those trimmer capacitors can be useful when you need to make tuning circuits.

Inductors

Batteries

They are probably the easiest to remove and often worth it. However, if its a very old battery operated device, most probably the batteries will be old chemical based batteries like Lead-Acid, Ni-Cd, Ni-MH etc.