Microwave Parts Salvage

Today I started taking apart a couple microwaves to see what parts could be salvaged. One of them was given to me because it didn't work, and I bought the other for $1.00 at a thrift sale.





I am most interested in the large transformers because of some plans I found for building an arc welder from microwave transformers. Those plans are available at: http://www.dansworkshop.com/Homebuilt%20arc%20welder.shtml. I highly recommend buying his plans if you are thinking of doing this project. They are very well written and contain a lot of good information.




There were a lot of other interesting components that I salvaged from them. All microwaves also have a very large capacitor in them. I am thinking of looking into selling these on eBay. I'm not sure if there is any demand for them, but I know large capacitors are pretty expensive.





The smaller microwave was much newer and contained a digital display. I played around with this a little and was able to get parts of it to display just by using the ohms on my multimeter. I think it would be pretty interesting to build a circuit to control this thing.





Both of these microwaves had schematics printed on the inside of the cases. I took a picture of the one for the older larger model.




Next I want to try rewinding the secondaries on the transformers I salvaged to make them high amperage, low voltage.

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