Scrapped a Brother Laser Printer- NOT Worth It!

I just finished scrapping a Brother laser printer (Model HL-14 manufactured in 2004) and the bottom line is that it definitely WAS NOT WORTH MY TIME (except for the learning experience I got).

First, a big negative was that the wiring inside was super thin. I held up the end and could BARELY see the copper inside. I’ve been told by local scrap yards to throw this stuff away, so I did just that.



Another negative. There were lots of screws. The housing was both steel and plastic and separating the two wasn’t the easiest to do. I know I could have likely sold the whole thing as steel and been done with it, but I wanted to do one the hard way to learn for the future.

There were 4 PC boards, but none had much copper.

The fan was plastic.

The motor was very small and lightweight. It wasn’t worth disassembling for the small amount of copper inside.

A HUGE negative is the ink cartridges. If that thing busted open, the mess it would have likely made would have been much more than any benefit I’d get from scrapping the printer.

I watched a YouTube video to prepare and have to admit that spending over an hour taking this apart was definitely a WASTE OF TIME.

I fully realize there might be some other types of printers that could potentially be worth scrapping, but it would take quite a bit of persuasion to get me to do this again anytime soon.

I’d estimate that the total I will get from the scrap is only 50 cents to $1. OUCH!

Some of the other brands don't seem as bad. Don't do many printers but it's easy enough to pull the main board and pitch the rest in the shred with some of them.

There have been quite a few printers coming in. Mac/Apple forced a change over to wireless years ago for security purposes. Win 10 seems to have changed it's software so that only wireless printers work with it now. It's a funny thing ... a reliable ( wire connected) printer that's been working for ten years will just stop working all of a sudden and nobody seems to know why.