What should I rip out of a car?

[NittanyLAncer]

OK Folks, hopefully there's some gear heads out there who can help me out.

I'm involved in running a small robotics club here at school, and we're low on parts (and funding). SO, I'm planning a trip to the local auto-salvage yard to rip some parts out of forsaken automobiles.

Now, some things are obvious.....Windshield Wiper motors, power door motors, simple headlight assemblies, maybe some car batteries or coil packs....all easily enough pried out of a wreck and can be used readily.

Now, here's my question....
"What else of electronic or simple mechanical value could I salvage from a wreck?" I'm curious about how I might take the important parts of Power Door Locks (the switch asembly and the locking mechanisms themselves), what might be some useful portions of the fuse box and dash pannel controls that can be easily removed, parts of the electrical system from which some nice capacitors or other nifty electronic components might be scavenged.

I'm curious how one might go about getting the rollers from a mini-van door....and some simple tip on how to get some of the nice fans and belt drivers out (the compressor from the brake systems could be nice), mabye some tips on how to get the whole hydrolics system off of a car with disc-brakes. Common hiding places for vehntilation components too (again, fans, compressors and the like). Places where there's a lot of wire I can rip out is good to know too (door are always lovely, as are steering columns). Common locations of positional selector switches and the like.....

Anything easily removed from a common make/model with a screw-driver, torque wrench, hack-saw and crow bar.....I want to know about.

Essentally, if I'm going to pay $30 to get in, I want to take as much out as I can. If I can scavenge sonar assemblies from broken old cameras I figure there's got to be plenty of stuff I can steal from a car.

I'm fairly familiar with auto's, but most of the time I google the repair and then do it. So if you generally give me a description of where to find everything I need to rip out on the terminating ends (IE if I can just rip out certian things and then piece the wires back later), I'm good. Or point me to where to go.....

-Thanks!

They give IST kiddies multimillion dollar buildings and the engineers have to go scrapyard diving.......what has the world come too?

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Are you in the FIRST competition?

 

[NittanyLAncer]

FIRST is fairly basic high-school stuff, but we work on a slightly different scale. Don't get me wrong, FIRST is a great program, it gets people interested in the right stuff......

I'm on the collegate level, and we mostly organize our own projects and internal competitions. A lot of it is purely for fun. We do a lot of automomous stuff, maze navigation and the like.

We've been moving into some of the slightly more interesting image proccessing / recognition stuff for navigation of a larger platform, mixing in GPS navigation with collision avoidance (kinda of like DARPA, only on a far smaller and simpler scale).

We can get computing resources, since those are easily obtained just by requesting the stuff and signing it out.....but stuff like wire, motors, breadboard etc. we need to scrounge up on our own. We have some great fabrication facilities, just no materials =(

OH! Forgot to mention.......locations to find large flat sheets of metal and the like. I was already planning on trying to cut off some door re-enforcements (the X beams in the door to protect from collision). I suppose I could use body pannels (if I knew an easy way of removing them, I was planning on just ising a crowbar to get to the goodies).

 

[feralkid]

I don't know about using a crowbar...Cordless recipro saw might be nice.

For sheet metal parts, anyway.

 

[EyeMWing]

Large flat pieces of metal... Like the HOOD? Those come off real easy.

Stuff to grab... Fuse panel, ignition switch (pry out with screwdriver, thief-style), ECU if you can find them (you can probably scavenge some neato microcontrollers and such from that), STEREO HEAD UNITS will have capacitors. Grab the dashboard wiring harnass while you're under there, you'll get at least 30 different colors

My main project vehicle is a minivan and I *THINK* I know how to get the door off the 1993-and-earlier Dodge/Chrysler/Plymouth minivans, though I've never actually done it. There are 3 sets of rollers, one top front, one top bottom, one exterior. Disengage the top and bottom front ones (top you can probably smash into with a hammer since it's a plastic enclosure), no idea how to get into the bottom, exterior roller should come right out of the track.

Take a partner, you'll need it.

 

[EyeMWing]

Originally posted by: feralkid
I don't know about using a crowbar...Cordless recipro saw might be nice.

For sheet metal parts, anyway.

Crowbar is great on interior.

 

[TitanDiddly]

http://robotmarketplace.com/

 

[NittanyLAncer]

Large flat pieces of metal... Like the HOOD? Those come off real easy.

Hoods are decidedly NOT flat. Although, a 80's Ford truck or an old GMC maybe, but most cars built after the mid 80's have a pretty marked curve in the hood. Although many undercarriage components are near prefectly plat on some surfaces (kick and smash plates that protect some of the underbody components on trucks and such).

I was planning on grabbing the wiring harness from the steering column, since that easily has a million trillion wires. I'm guessing you're referring to something different? Oh well....I'll keep an eye out under some dash's.

ECU might be interesting, but it's probably not all that re-programable, and certainly not in anything readily available for input/output type things. We have access to tons fo Basic Stamps and several other more advanced controllers (although you can kludge up some serial interface between the most basic controllers and a C program to input from sensors and output to a servo controller). That's not much of a concern.

Myself and another officer are going to go, spend most of the day.

I would buy stuff, but no money. I think we spent 75% of out budget on 5 sheets of black poster board (we're THAT poor). Hence the ripping stuff out of cars. Well, it's pretty fun, might be worth the $30 to just go to the scrapyard and wail into stuff with a sledge, mass destruction in a legal way.

 

[NittanyLAncer]

No more suggestions?

100 Posts....w00t!

 

[shekondar]

A couple of other things you could grab:
Airbag sensors = accelerometers (not sure where you'd find them, though)
Power seat motors/mechanisms
Starter motor
Assorted relays - these should be easy to find (look near the fuse panel & under the hood)

 

[huesmann]

These are gonna be some heavy-ass robots.

 

[BadNewsBears]

Relays. In the fuse panel and if its an suv try the acces hole in the rear. inside