Oscilloscope:the autopsy

Today I performed the postmortem on the oscilloscope(see two posts down)which decided to smoke.I fully expected to see some blackened parts once I removed the covers.But the circuit boards are in perfect shape,so wherever the shortcircuit happened it must have been in another place.
After working on it for a few hours I still haven't found the origin of the smoke,even though a strong burned smell still hangs over the remains of the scope.To be continued.......

A cd player is a box with air......

Or in other words:not much goes in a cd-player nowadays,so it's mainly filled with .....air.Nevertheless there are some useful parts to be had from obsolete cd-players.Many have 3 small motors in them,very handy when building small BEAM projects.Then there are a few metal parts like rods,electronic components from the circuit board,cable and the metal housing of course.

Oscilloscoop

Yes,I know it's spelled oscilloscope,but that's poetic freedom for you.I was going to tell all about the Philips oscilloscope I got for free last weekend and me getting to learn how to use it.Well,when I was testing it last evening it kinda started to smoke.Somehow having two probes plugged in and then starting to turn knobs at random was too much for the poor device.

There is a chance that it isn't as bad as it looked(and that was pretty bad),but I'll find that out tomorrow when I do the autopsy.
The last few days I have been more busy with taking apart things than actually building them.But I have a few designs for pendulums/magbots in my head and the parts to build the frames.What I need to do is to test how good the coils are which I took from the old VCRs.
I have plenty of them right now or, if those don't work very well,I'll make my own coils out of the copperwire taken from transformators.

Update

Just came back from a short visit to the US,so there hasn't been much tinkering done in the past week.But I did manage to find a copy of the book "Junkbots etc" by Mark Tilden and David Hrynkiw(I hope I spelled that right)which will keep me occupied for many hours.
I've just noticed that the last pummer I made is actually working,it uses the circuitry from an old solar garden light and parts from a hard disk and record-player arm.