This is fascinating to me. I know when buying replacement car parts, the first place I always used to look was the junkyard, but I figured this was a very thoroughly exploited field. (I used to, in my more shoestring and duct tape phase, build my server racks out of secondhand parts too, but I rapidly learned the power costs/lack of computational/hardware modernity bit me in the ass, so there's also my question of what sort of salvage doesn't fall prey to this?) My gut feel was broadly that it's cheaper to buy something new on digikey than to spend the man-hours cutting/heatgunning the part out of some junk.

Clearly I'm wrong, so take this comment as a "I'd love to learn more if you're willing/able to talk about it"

Others are questioning some of your choices around this so I thought I’d weigh in a little with my experience.

I never sold directly but I did work for a company earlier in my career that served high amp tractor trailer generators, power distribution equipment (later the department I ended up bootstrapping for them), lighting, and grip equipment to the film industry.

Early on my time there I was tasked with unloading and either stripping down or full on demolishing multiple 50 ft tractor trailers stacked to the ceiling loads of old stands (scrap metal), lamps (scrap metal, wiring, ceramic housings, aluminum housings, electronics), and high-amp ballasts for old Xenon and HMI lamps (a lot of electronics including some pretty hefty transformers. I have a stupid story about almost killing myself crippling a 20year old capacitor in one of those things...).

I worked on that for at least 60hrs a week for many weeks at not a great wage but they willingly paid me a lot of overtime to do it.

A lot of those parts weren’t going into new products but repairing high value equipment that the longer it all lived the more profitable it was. They’re probably still using some of that stuff.

I would have never thought to have started a business doing it though! I think most places are more willing to exploit young employees for it.

There's a huge market in repairing and retrofitting capital equipment. I've been working with someone doing just that for a while now as he gets his customers to validate the device I built.

Just like we'd use a bit of code to glue software utilities together, the same concept exists in hardware. Build simple interfaces to connect bits of hardware that were never designed to work together. A common, and cheap example are the USB to Serial converter dongles.

It's a great way to fix a 40 year-old machine that you can't get spare parts for: figure out a way to interface it to a more modern controller at a small fraction of the cost of a new machine.

I've definitely done it to interface with old scsi drives externally by cannibalizing old power supplies and connectors — and also because I was cheap... [read: poor].

I knew a person a few years back who's business was selling scrap electronics to a company in Russia. They would salvage all sorts of electronic equipment, strip them down and sort everything out and send it all to Russia in a container. It was a pretty lucrative business, at least it appeared so.

You need to be very careful in that space to not run afoul of ITAR and other export compliance regulations. Not worth it for a side hustle imo.

Here are some questions I thought of while reading your short description.

-Is selling to repair shops a big part of your business? If not, why are you doing it? Seems like it might be a time suck. You might be better off just putting all parts online and letting those small repair shops buy through that.

-Can you hire someone to do the grunt work (pulling parts etc)? I was always worried about hiring someone and then I realized that 1. you don't have to hire them full time, many people want part time work and 2. if you are profitable enough, they should be paying for themselves and then some. So don't be afraid just to hire some local labour.

-Why do you need an investor? Run the profits back through the business or put in some personal capital. $5000 will get you a part time employee working 25 hours a week for a few months.

Hit me up - email's in profile :)

How much do you need?