Beware cheap resistors!!!

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I bought several sets of E12 resistor sets on E-Bay from a supplier I will not name expect to say that he claims to "know" electronics. Tape mounted, not floor sweepings, looked fine at a good price.

Some problems with a circuit I was working on led me (after a couple of hours!) to check and may sure I'd used the right values. Measuring I found that several 47k resistors (yellow, violet, black, red) resistors were actually 56K! I went back to the tape mounted set that remained and found that the first 5 that remained were 56K, followed by 47K for the rest, all marked as 47k.

I asked my brother, who runs a small electrical equipment supply business, about this and he said that they were probably "run out" parts, pulled from a production run when they changed over values. Since the exact point of the changeover isn't known at the end, a portion of the run before and after the change is supposed to be pulled out and discarded.

Or sold on E-Bay I guess.... from now on I'm going to check each one before I use it.
 
I always measure them first on the tape and pick the ones i want, or is often the case building amps pick two matched resistors so i have the same value on both channels. Might be a little OCD but at least you know what your using..
 
In all my years running a pro shop, I never bought parts on ebay, and that is one reason why. For parts as inexpensive as resistors, I think it is false economy to save a penny, when i can buy good parts from trusted suppliers cheaply.
 
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