Today with so many LED and DCC projects to do I find that a good supply of resistors is a must. I probably have hundreds thousands on hand especially 1K but there were a few values that it seemed like I was always searching for so I picked up an assortment of metal film resistors here:
Its pretty easy to make out the color bands on the tan resistors but the metal film ones have a blue background so, to me, the color stripes make no sense at all. Most look like black to dark brown and it is difficult to make out one from another.
I know I can check each one with the meter but when I’m trying to sort out handfuls of loose resistors, that can be pretty time consuming.
So I wondered if any of you had any tricks for reading the bands on these metal film resistors?
Use a bright light, and sometimes a magnifying glass helps. There are only the 12 basic colors, if you count gold and silver. No fucia or mauve or any mixed girly colors.
I recommend buying or printing out a resistor color code guide. I got one at Radio Shack a long time ago. Here is a link to one you can print out and assemble: Here
Yeah, just have decent light. I know several sayings to remember the color codes, however none of them is suitable content to post here. Never did learn any totalyl ‘clean’ ones.
The majority of what I use are the 1K and I can spot those pretty quick but for some of the signals I need 150Ω on up to about 1.2K The red LEDs are much brighter than the yellow and green and require more resistance, and in some cases I still use grain o rice lamps that require several different values.
Yeah I have one of those. Must be 40 years old by now. Gave it right here in my hands actually. Came in handy when I was given a box full of electronic parts all jumbled together. I took egg cartons and sorted them all by value. Forget where I learned the first mnemonic, but it was one of the bad ones.
The color code goes Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Grey, White.
You’ve already got the Bad Boys Our Young Girls Violet
It becomes fairly obvious what nastiness not suitable for children you can make with words that start with the same letter as the colors. Or you can just google for resistor color code mnemonic and have it spelled out for you, in many variants.
I think the engineer who came up with these dirty phrases did so so as to appear not so geeky [:D]
Back in college I took a year of electronics but they would never tell us the resistor code mnemonic so I never memorized how to read the resister colors - now we have google.