[Jeffhs]

As an amateur radio operator for 37 years myself, I am well familiar with the concept of the "junk box"; in fact, I had one years ago, when I lived in a Cleveland suburb and collected old TVs from my neighbors' trash. I'd rob parts and tubes from the unrepairable sets to repair the good ones, and literally had boxes full of old parts and tubes in my basement workshop as well, so I almost always had the parts I needed to get and keep my restorable sets working.

There is no reason I can't do the same with older, unrepairable solid-state gear today. In fact, you gave me an idea: When the monitor on my computer finally gasps its last breath and fails (even though it currently works well, the monitor is so old now I won't bother having it fixed when it dies; I'll probably replace it with--gasp!--a flat panel), rather than just throwing the entire unit in the trash, I'll look inside the monitor (after discharging the CRT, of course) for things such as rectifier diodes, capacitors, etc. I'm sure I'll find plenty of those in this and just about any other piece of cast-off electronic gear one finds in trash piles these days, including cast-off personal computers (most of these found in trash piles, however, will be without their hard disks; I think that's the law [to remove the hard drive] when disposing of an old computer). In fact, I have a Sony 60-CD stereo system, found near the trash barrels in back of my apartment a few weeks ago, in which the CD player doesn't seem to work; I'm trying to restore it, but if my efforts fail, I will cannibalize the thing and save whatever good parts I can find. I have nothing to lose; in fact, I'll probably be doing myself a favor if I do cannibalize that stereo, as I already have a good (smaller), if old (nine years) bookshelf stereo system and, to be perfectly honest, I have no room for another one, as I live in a very small apartment.

73,