"Cydrome Leader" wrote in message
...
Arfa Daily wrote:


"Pat" wrote in message
...
Similar to Arfa not being able to see parts on the floor...
Yesterday, I decided to connect a simple circuit to tell me if I left
the garage door open when going to bed. I found a reed switch and
matching magnet in my junk box as well as an LED (with built in
current limiting resistor) and a left over wall-wart power supply.
After connecting it all up I realized the LED was on when the door was
closed rather than open which I preferred. I didn't have a N.O.
switch but I did find an old piece of breadboard and a 2n3904
transistor. All I needed was a 10K resistor to use as a pull up to
make my own inverter. I also wanted to add a 470 ohm R in series with
the LED to lower the current a little. Bottom line: It all works
well, but took way longer than expected. Why? It took a long time to
find the right R's in my old box containing hundreds of 1/4 w R's. The
1/4 Watt resistors in my box clearly have shrunk over the last 30
years! And, the color stripes have all faded to the same shade of
darkness, too. I kept pulling 4700 ohm R's from the box when looking
for the 470 because the red stripe looked brown to me. I'm glad I
don't do this for a living anymore!
Pat




Ah, but were you looking at them under one of those crap CFL light bulbs.
A
while back, I put one in my bench light, and then found that I could no
longer read resistors. The spectrum is so discontinuous that I was
finding
that it was almost impossible to tell brown from orange from red, and
purple
from blue or grey. Normal service was resumed when I went back to a
'proper'
light bulb. Trouble is that frosted ones that give a nice even light
across
the work area, are now almost impossible to obtain because of all this
eco-bollox nonsense, so I've since made an adaptor from fixing a bipin
holder into a bayonet base culled from a CFL that failed after about 10
hours service (this is the only decent use I've ever found for one), and
I
now run the light from an old 12 volt lighting transformer, using a
dichroic
halogen bulb fitted into the adaptor. The light is a bit 'streaky'
compared
to a frosted bulb, and doesn't spread as far across the bench due to the
shape of the reflector on those bulbs, but at least it does a 'proper'
job
of illuminating boards, and the colours of the resistors are right and
readable.

I used to keep all my resistors in a total of perhaps six or seven
drawers.
Sort of "1 ohm to 100 ohms", "101 ohms to 1K" and so on. But like you, as

On a tangent- how do people here organize their resistors and other parts?

By range or by the first significant digits?

I don't do repair work full time, so I just have boxes of stuff, mostly in
smaller bags already marked with values since I just get those
"engineering sample kits" from digikey to cover common ranges of stuff.

I can't stand the screech of those little plastic parts drawers so I never
use them.


Mine don't screech, and I've got hundreds ! I debated long and hard how to
re-organise my resistors, and eventually decided to keep them together by
decades. So the first four drawers have 0.1 ohm, 1 ohm general, 1 ohm
fusible and 1 ohm w/w. Next comes the varieties of 10 ohm, then 100 ohm,
then 1k, 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M. Then it moves onto the "15's" as in 1.5 ohms,
15 ohms, 150, 1.5k, 15k and so on. The last drawers are the "82's".

I don't know in the end if this was the best way to do it, but I quickly got
used to it, and am now able to reach to the right area for a value, without
even looking.

Arfa