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Wondering if anyone had ever tried breaking down appliances and selling the good parts to do it yourselfers? My neighbor gave me this idea when he told me he spent almost $50 on some drum rollers for his Maytag dryer. (I know I have probably scrapped 10+ of the same rollers over the past year.) Just asking if anyone has tried this and if so, was it worth the time and effort. Seems like you could make some pretty good money doing this.
That may be a good idea. If you had the room you could rebuild and sell used appliances and parts. Offer free delivery and removal of old appliance. Repairing them is not that difficult.
Selling the parts on the net would be very time consuming in my opinion. I would think that would require a full time position documenting, listing, photos, packing, answering the millions of questions people are sure to have. You could make good money I would think but you would need to have a good inventory.
There is a market for it, the trick is organization and inventory control. You need to keep w record of what parts came off of what machine. You will make more than scrap value, but you need to wait until somebody needs one first.
I am currently giving it a try, can't hurt anything.
I think there'd have to be a potential market for selective items, such as the motors, timers, etc; That little dishwasher motor you scrap for maybe five dollars costs me 119.00 new, I usually just buy a new dishwasher instead. That wouldn't of been the case if I could of gotten a clean low mileage used motor for half that. Keep the model # of the appliance the parts come off of, and I wouldn't ruin my ebay reputation selling anything I wasn't 100% sure worked correctly. You can print USPS shipping labels for Ebay at home and USPS will even send you the boxes via your carrier upon request, so it's actually pretty low maintenance work to do from the comfort of your home.
If you want an idea of what prices are going for, google Appliance Parts Samurai,which is also an excellent site for appliance repair tips.
I'd be really selective about what I sold, drum rollers are a definite wear item from day one, I'd never buy them used.
Thanks for the ideas guys. I think I will take your advice and try it on some select items. I already fix a lot of the machines that I pick up so having a parts stash just for myself would probably be worth the time it took to set everything up.
Items like this: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Fisher-Payke...item2c614d2bfe could make some extra money for scrappers. Right now ebay has a pretty sweet deal where you can list 50 items free each month, only paying ebay if it sells. Toss say a washer or dryer lid on there for $20 or $25, whatever you think would be worth your time to package and take to post office. If it doesn't sell after a week, with about three clicks of the mouse you can relist it for another week, etc.
I do this with some of my small market but still usable escrap, (random weird boards out of servers, etc). I list/relist them 3 or 4 times for free, and if they don't sell after a few weeks I toss em on the pile and scrap them.
I have been thinking about this thread for a while. I recall discussions in the past about ebaying shelves from refrigerators and ovens. So why not other parts to appliances?
In the washer dryer area I have a freind who does only washer/dryer repair. We live in a community of perhaps a couple hunred thousand and he does very well. I don't think he would be interested in buying used parts but you never know. There might be a market with the repair companies in your area.
Certainly a stock pile of parts would be helpful to those wanting to re-sell scrapped appliances. Very interesting thread, Mike.