More than a month before this writing, I saw a craigslist ad for "free sound console for parts".  I sent an email right away, and about a day later, this old console was sitting in my garage.

The console is a 24 channel, 4 bus, 2 mains sound mixing console: the BIAMP 2442

The thing probably weighed 60 pounds and measured about 4ft wide, 2.5 ft deep, and 8" high at the back of the meter bridge. It was old, with more than a couple years of grime coating the knobs, buttons, and most of the panel. 
At first I thought I could get it working again, by repacing the 24 XLR mic jacks and the 3 XLR output jacks.  Unfortunately this requires an external power supply that was not included.  So instead of spending who knows how much to replace all the missing pieces for an old board, I figured I would part it out for its hundreds of dollars worth of parts.

I took the bottom panel off, to reveal the channel strips, and removed the buss wires that had connectors. Then I used a small pry bar to help me pry off the 236 knobs.  Realizing that it would take far too long to loosen them all by hand, I used a long socket on my cordless drill to unscrew the 236 nuts that fastened the 236 potentiometers. After snipping a few power buss bars and few other misc wires, and removing only a small handful of screws, I was able to lift the channel strip boards right out.

I'm still desoldering.
If my calculations are correct, here are the major parts I'll get out of this:

243 DPDT pushbutton switches with button caps,
236 pots with knobs
123 1/4" jacks - I'll have to find the odd size panel nuts to fit most of these.
  77 RC4558P dual general purpose opamps
  66 NE5534P low noise high speed audio opamp
  52 LEDs half each in red and green
  30 fader/slider potentiometers
  28 LF351N wide bandwidth j-fet opamps
  24 Audio transformers (to balance or unbalance a signal)
    8 RCA jacks
    4 TL072CP dual low noise general purpose opamps
    4 trim potentiometers
    4 VU meters, each backlit with two lamps
    2 TDA2030 14W hi-fi audio amplifiers
score!

That will be more than 5,000 solder points to desolder. (after you add in all the capacitors)

I went to Mouser electronics' online catalog, and looked at some prices for these components.  By my figures, if I had to by an equivalent quantity and quality of these parts, I'd have to spend roughly $1,900.   Not bad for a few hours desoldering, no?

As of 7/28/08 I've desoldered 23 channel strips and 3 subs.  I'm leaving one of each type of board: Channel, Sub, Left, and Right  to examine (perhaps for some reverse engineering) before I desolder them too.

I soon went from little tubs to organize the parts, to quart and gallon size bags for the jacks, pots, and buttons. I found some surplus anti-static tubes made for DIP IC chips to sort and store all the opamps in.