Salvage Yard: CD/DVD Drives

Nowadays, a CD and DVD drives are cheap, and not as much reliable as they were in the 90's. Also Blu-Ray devices are getting more popular, replacing older technologies. So it's more than likely that you'll find a broken or no longer needed drive around your house or in the garage.

But wait a minute before getting rid of it!

With some basic tools (usually a phillpis-head and flat-head screwdrivers are all what you need) you can salvage some valuable (at least for an RC pilot as yourself) parts from it!

First of all open the drive. You'll need a small phillips-head screwdriver. Inside you'll find a main circuit board (which is useless for our purposes) and some mechanisms:



Laser Assembly
Most of the interesting parts are in the Laser Assembly. First of all we have a small servo-motor and a laser head - unfortunatelly both are not very useful for us.

Then we have a laser head guides - perfectly straight, 3 mm rods, made of hardened steel. They are a perfect replacement brushless motor shafts! Not only you can cut them to the desired length - they're stronger than most original shafts too!

Last but not least - in the corners of the assembly you'll find a rubber bushings. Different drives use different solutions here, but most of them (and I've salvaged parts from at least 15 drives of many brands) have a soft bushings made of silicone rubber - a perfect solution for mounting your multicopter controller board or other vibration-sensitive equipment!

Tray Assembly / Tray Servo-Motor
You can salvage the motor. It's small brushed motor unfortunatelly it won't have much use in the RC hobby though. There are also some plastic gears and rubber bands here. I usually keep the motor if it's not soldered to the PCB.

Spindle Motor
A few years ago cd-rom spindle motors were a real treasure for RC modellers. With a pretty simple mods many guys transformed them to three-phase brushless motors providing a decent power for their models. It's no longer profitable today, as brushless motors are really cheap, so I usually leave the spindle motor alone...

One more important thing - don't, and I repeat - don't throw the rest of the parts into the general garbage! Not only it's harmful for the environment (think about all the poor squirrels!), but also you may be fined for that in many countries! Bring them to some PC/Electronics center.