----- Original Message ----- From: "rixy04" To: Sent: Tuesday, June 15, 2004 4:37 PM Subject: Re: [OT:] RadioShack Canada S***s > The price of 200 resistors is US$6.00. If I have to run to town and buy a > blister pack of five resistors for 35 cents, I've just wasted $$$$ for them plus > the time to drive to town to get them, and the gas it took. Total? $12 for 5 > resistors. How do you get to $12 for 5 resistors? As a hobbiest, you go to the store to get them when you're near there and you don't count your time to go into the store to buy them; this is a hobby. If I value my hobby time at $30/hour then the RGB LED fader I just built is worth at least $100; so I shouldn't have wasted the time building it when I can buy a fading LED for $1. > > Same goes for ordering 10 or more; it means the price for your project is > > multiplied by 10 *and* you have to store all the junk, probably for years. > > This is probably reasonable for business, but not for the hobbiest. > It depends on how much of a "hobbiest" you are. As a hobbiest, I can stuff over > 50 resistors in a simple single project. So 50 resistors at $12 for 5, that means at the local store you just spent $120 on those 50 resistors? The 10 or more was referring to any part. How many membrane keypads do you use in a year, or an LCD of a specific configuration, or a specific sized enclosure. Do you really want to pay for and store 10 of each of these when your project only calls for 1? Even with 50 resistors on the project, is it reasonable to buy 200 of each value included in the project? Most will probably be in series with LEDs or as pull-up/pull down resistors, so they'll mostly be one of 2 values. What about the ones you only use one of and probably won't use in your next project? $6 for 200 is 3 cents each, $0.35 for 5 is 7 cents each. I'd rather be able to run into the local store and pay the 35 cents as I need certain values. Actually my local store has the resistors loose in those little drawers for 5 cents each; and yes, I've gone in and bought a single resistor as my entire purchase for the visit. > VCR's and other switching supplies have low ESR caps and other good stuff. I > have robbed a few chassis in my time and it has been very beneficial. Caps are > easy to test. Takes only about 10 seconds to recover a dollar cap. You can desolder a cap, test it, and sort it away into your carefully labeled storage drawers in 10 seconds. Wow, and I thought I was good with a soldering iron. It's only worth a dollar if you use it. I'd stripped a quite few chassis too. It's a huge waste of time. What percentage of parts your stripped over the years do you think you've used and what percentage have you throw out or you still have cluttering up your work space? I once removed 32 18-pin DRAM chips that were directly soldered to a couple of junk memory cards to use in my laser printer. It's worth it *if* you have an immediate use for the part; and an 18-pin DIP is quite a bit more work to desolder than a cap. If you're going to store the part for an unknown amount of time, it's not worth it. Throw away the chassis and spend $1 to buy the part a few years later if you do happen to need it. > Again, I have a shop full of parts. Some I may use and some I may never. I have > friends and neighbors come over all the time asking to fix something of theirs. > They pay me well. Well enough for me to look at a lot of parts just sit there. Most you will never use. For the few you need, you get paid well enough to buy it from a supplier, and your friends will wait a few extra days. > My "hobbiest" shop is a 24X36 foot garage. Everyone's impressed when I can > repair almost anything. My "hobbiest" shop is the dining room table and a 2x4' storage cupboard. Before my big move, I probably had about the same amount of space as you but in the basement, and the space was filled with clutter; old laser printer assemblies and other pieces of equipment in various states of disassembly, 4 oscilliscopes, from an old heathkit to a fairly modern DSO, and a lot of other equipment and space taken over by spare parts. I am much better off this way, even if it does cost more overall to complete a project. The only gotcha is that I never have a complete parts list until I'm finished the project. $6 for shipping added to the total cost of parts in very reasonable, $6 x 5 for the 5 items I didn't know I needed when I placed the last order kills the value of the project. I used to fix things for friends and family as well as myself. It isn't worth it anymore. If it takes me 4 hours to fix a VCR that can be replaced for $60, why bother? My time is worth more than $15/hour. Consumer electronics is so cheap in price and quality these days it's basically disposable. > I never buy less than $200 from Digikey at a time. I have a wantlist and when it > gets big enough and component is needed soon, the order goes in. I try to do that with a threshold at around $50. What happens thoush is I get my $50 order in, start working on the project and then realize I'm missing something that's a few dollars. Then do I wait until I'm ready to start my next project and add the parts missing from the previous one or just take the hit and waste the shipping costs? If I choose the former, I will never finish anything, so it has to be the latter, but there's always something I'm missing. To get back to the original thread, I used to hate radio shack for charging $1 for 20 cents worth of parts, but that was when I was in Toronto where there are electronics strores everywhere. Now that I don't have access to the real stores, I think that for what you can get at radioshack, it is worth 5 times the price for small parts when you only need a few things. > I have numerous portable devices. All have been upgraded to NiMH. I can always > use more. Then buy more when you need them; don't just round out orders with them > It's been so long since I've been to RadioSlack, the last time I drove by, it > had moved across town.....4 years ago. > Rick I stopped going to Radio Shack about 6 years ago when the US stores wouldn't sell me a DirecTv satellite dish. I've only recently starting going back and that's because there's nowhere else to go here. Jason -- http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic: [PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads