Resistors have bands, that indicate their ratings. I can find the charts, my problem is I can’t tell what colors I am seeing.
From right to left I see gold, red, maroon and brown, except maroon isn’t a real choice. Maybe it’s brown and orange?
Help me out, thanks
Look like brown / violet / red to me … 1700 ohms. The gold indicates a 5% tolerance.
When in doubt, stick your meter across the leads and measure the restance.
Mark.
You’re giving me a Homer Simpson moment doh!
It measures 1100, light brown, dark brown?
The metal-film resistors are the ones that get me [:(!]
Against a deep blue background it is anybosy’s guess what color the bands are.
An auto-range ohm meter is the way to go. Another handy tool I have is a decade box. I have a huge one I dragged home from work but recently got a handy one that uses jumpers to set the resistance.
I can “fine-tune” the resistance I want, or the brightness of an LED I’m looking for.
Good Luck, Ed
I ran downstairs with a resistor in my hand looking for a meter that worked. After I found one, tested the resisitor, I went to put it back in the package and the package is gone. Retraced my steps 3 times and still no package. 
Decade box, new to me, does that decade box have resistance built into it?
Old school decade box, with all the dials across it:
Dial in the resistance you want. There are newer, smaller ones (cheaper) like the one that uses the jumpers I linked to. It is a half-watt, there are quarter watt ones even cheaper.
I have a lab power supply and dial up 12 volts (my lighting buss) or 13 volts, most of my DCC lighting decoder outputs. I select the LED I want to use, start with the highest resistance and gow down until I get the brightness I’m looking for then match a resistor to those results.
I probably wouldn’t have known about them either but since they were tossing one out at work, I grabbed it and immediately saw how handy it would be for the model railroad electronics “lab”.
Cheers, Ed
Most of the leaded resistors coming from China use colors so pale it’s next to impossible to distinguish some colors from others, so I don’t even try any more. When strips of them are taped together, it’s easy enough to write on the tape, but once they’ve been pulled off, all hope is lost. I just use my meter.
–Randy
I lucked out on my last resistor purchase, I bought a 2600pcs 130 Value Each 1% 1/4W Metal Film Resistor Assortment Kit (US Seller) off eBay and the resistor values were marked on the paper tape. I still checked each value before storing them.
I store bulk resistors in small parts envelopes and keep them in a cardboard bin box, easy to label.
I store small parts that I use a lot in Stack-On storage cabinets including most used resistors.
Like Randy I gave up many years ago trying to read the color code on resistors when the good old Ohmite resistors were easily available.
Now I keep a cheapo A830L multimeter readily available (stuck to my workstation with Velcro) to read each resistor before use, I don’t trust my filing eyesi
1100 ohms would be brown / brown / red. Your resistor colors don’t look to be the same brown on the first two bands. The meter don’t lie though.
Mark.
Well, it can’t be 1700, that’s not a value in ANY standard tolerance group. 1100 is dead on for a 5% or 2%. Even though they look different, I think the first two bands are both brown. So it’s brown-brown-red-gold, 1100 ohm, 5%.
–Randy
When these style came out, I started using my Harbor Freight meter. Saved a lot of guessing. At one time when I made a lot of circuits I had a meter set up at the work bench just for this purpose. The meters are cheap enough. I still have four of these meters.
Rich
