Well my comments are about the topic, Re-use of components through salvage; not about Bannister.

He appears to perceive differing options on the TOPIC as a personal attack upon him. I did ask Bannister if he worked for Gold Star... heheeh maybe that alone was worth his emotional responce; I know many of us would find that engineering-wise, offensive but then again we wouldn't be salvage components for resale.

Back in the late 70's, while I was applying to universities for my undergraduate work, I was curious about integrated circuits and could find few books available on the subject. For my own education, I bought some salvage printed circuit boards from IBM to study the chip numbers, the physical nature of the board layout, and deduced the boards function. I was new buying logic integrated circuits from radio shack at inflated prices and building up some experimental circuits. I tried to salvage a few components from the boards, but I didn't have the fancy lab equipment my electronic company has today.

Excluding some sparce economies in our global market (since this is an international discussion and not just about the U.S. market), I don't think you can make a business case for salvaging parts even if you use inflated timing quotes suggested.

The labor time, the special equipment useful life consumed, the testing time and the handling time all combine to greatly exceed the cost of new components. And that's new components without suspect quality due to unknown history salvage.

For resistors and simple capacitors, I buy them for around $0.002 to $0.02 apeice. Logic ICs go for $0.30 to $0.45 each. I challenge anyone to sit down, open a spread sheet, calculate your true costs of salvage and to show us that you aren't realling paying ten times the price of new parts.

aka j