"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in
:
bz wrote:
"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in
:
bz wrote:
Fingernail polish comes with built in brush. Lots of different
colors available now days.
The brush is too wide to write on ICs with.
Depends on how you trim it.
And it IS fine for color coding. 
That was what I used red model paint for. I repaired Commodore 64
computers to the component level when they first came out. I built a
test bed with ZIF sockets to test suspect ICs. Good chips got a dot of
paint by pin one. Some of the parts already had yellow or green dots,
so I used the red paint I already had. A guy in the Orlando Commodore
computer club asked me for an estimate to repair his computer.
It was about fifty dollars. He was yelling that I was trying to rip
him off, and to bring it to him at the next meeting, even though
everyone else charged $75 or more to even look at one, and usually
exchanged the board with a factory rebuild. He went though his rants
again, then left.
The next week he was back, screaming, "I replaced all the chips you
marked bad, and it still doesn't work! You don't know what the hell
you're doing!" I smiled, and about half the other members did, as
well. I told him that I marked GOOD parts, not the bad ones. He
started swearing and screaming that I had to use green paint to mark
good parts. I told him I preferred red, and it was obvious that he was
a thief, and had never intended to let me repair it in the first place.
He never came back. :-)
By the way. Those colors are handy for marking 'look alike' parts when
you are building a kit. That way, you do not need to unsolder the
capacitors to find where you swapped a .01 and a .001.
I've never had that problem, in 45+ years of building electronics.
When building a kit, I always sorted the parts as I unpacked them, to
make sure everything was there.
Of course one should do that. However, when building a complex kit with
lots of 'look alike parts', even the most careful person may work a couple
of minutes past 'too tired', and grab the wrong part for a particular
location. Later, one notices that one is 'short' a particular value part
and realizes that one must have already used it in a wrong place. Fun to
try to find without color coding.
Color coding the parts once they are sorted gives one
a) the chance to double check the sorting.
b) a way, later, to double check the placement against the layout diagram.
c) comes in handy when, for example, your Elecraft K2 transciever shows a
strange spurious response on a particular band because you interchanged
two bypass capacitors.
--
bz 73 de N5BZ k
please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.
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