If you’re looking for a replacement part, we recommend shopping locally; patronage of small electronic and supply stores keeps the hobbyist community alive. If you’re unable to find a part locally, chances are you can find it at one of places below. It would be possible to build an entire civilization purely from the inventory of these companies.

Gainger Industrial Supply

McMaster-Carr

Mouser Electronics

Digi-Key Corporation

Allied Electronics

Hosting disassembly images is quite bandwidth intensive, and HostPC’s reasonably generous bandwidth quotas allows TakeItApart to continue. Last July TakeItApart was able to survive — and remain operational — during a BBC mention and digg front-page promotion largely because of HostPC’s stable servers. It may be a bit pricier than other webhosts per gigabyte of bandwidth transfer, but they make up for it with real, reachable service people. I’ve never had a service ticket go more than twelve hours without a response, and have even spoken (via phone) with the owner when a rare outage occurred last spring.

HostPC is based near Syracuse, NY with a datacenter in Florida. They’re currently undergoing some sort of rebranding to be called “Yareo” (strange, I know), but they stress they will remain the same. Unlike large corporate hosts which have unreachable service and inconsistent uptime, it has been my experience that HostPC tries to personally serve its customers. I urge anyone looking to switch hosts or start a website to give them a try.

EDIT: It seems that for an indeterminate amount of time HostPC is offering free hosting. (100MB space/2GB bandwidth) Not huge, but a nice start for someone looking to experiment with a webhost with PHP/MySQL/Perl/Ruby on Rails.

-Chris

We were especially pleased to learn that TakeItApart dot Net was recently mentioned on the BBC World show “Click.”(link) Possibly as a result, TakeItApart also made it to the Digg homepage (digg it). I welcome all those who heard about us through those two sources as well as anyone else who might have stumbled across this site, and encourage you to register in the forum. You can then create and submit your own disassembly guides. (Or just post them in the wiki.)

If you have been taking things apart your whole life and think you might want to help us, we are still looking for contributors. Drop us a line at jobs [at] takeitapart [dot] net . We cannot pay unfortunately, as we are college students, but we would love to have more disassembly guides to show to the world. This site aims to be a resource, and we hope to make it as complete as possible.

We hope you have a fun time while you’re here and hope you come back!
Chris Tomkins-Tinch, Brandon Kimball, and the TakeItApart team.

Here is the video from the BBC:

Thanks, and remember to have fun,
Chris, brandon and the TakeItApart.net crew.