Where can I get parts for 12V battery charger

[Larry Bud]

For starters, personal debt would go down.

[Don Klipstein]

In article ,

I suspect that UPS Ground from DigiKey to most locations in the US would be about $4 for their smallest size box and minimal content. Plus a $5 handling charge if your order is less than $25 or something like that. They may charge "UPS Chart Rate" but get a big discount, which they pocket to defray cost of the package, packing material, and doing the packaging and also a bit of profit. Their parts prices are so low that I see their markup over full "standard package" per-unit prices barely covering cost of repackaging into smaller quantities and only some of the other costs of getting them from a "standard package FOB manufacturer" to your package of parts.

They have a highly automated system for that. It would cost them more after cost of extra labor to send your package by first class mail instead, probably at about $2 for postage. I have an impression that their smallest box with packing material weighs about 5 ounces, plus the weight of the merchandise. The automated system requires a small variety of box sizes for the bulk of their shipments to minimize cost.

1. Electronics has largely been offshored by higher USA labor costs (including labor overhead or USA-specific extra employee expense such as health insurance at USA bloated healthcare cost rate, and auto insurance), higher liability and liability insurance costs, and more-expensive-to- comply-with workplace safety and environmental regulations. Have you seen yet fire extinguishers with a flammability rating? I first started seeing those around 2004 or so. For that matter, I think the rule book would get fatter rather than thinner to get fire extinguishers an exemption from whatever chemical product regulation gave us this!

So, there is little electronic prodct or electronic component manufacturing in the USA now. I suspect a lot of DigiKey's customers are hobbyists, prototype developers, consultants and specialty small job manufacturers making a small quantity of actual products, and the small remainder of actual electronic product manufacturers in the US, and a few manufacturers of products that use a few loose electronic components (as opposed to entire circuit boards). I suspect DigiKey also has some Canadian customers including product manufacturers.

1. The local parts stores can't compete against DigiKey in any way except by getting parts to you today rather than tomorrow.

DigiKey even goes a bit of the way there by accepting online orders as late as 8 PM Central time and getting them to you the next morning.

Mouser is also doing some of what DigiKey does. The other main electronic components distributors as far as I know are Allied-Newark, Future Electronics, and Jameco. There are a few hobbyist/surplus type places, and the ones that come to my mind most are Hosfelt, BG MIcro and All Electronics. There are some local ones, but they are dying out to such an extent that not every city in the US has one.

- Don Klipstein ( [e-mail])

[Stormin Mormon]

And then try to sell you an upgrade for your cell phone.

[hallerb]

My business is repairing roll laminating machines, and buy parts where I can to save BIG BUCKS.

GBC has a board thats near a 100 bucks where a 10 dollar transistor fails. So I buy and swap that transistor to save money, its as good as a new board and saves near 90 bucks:)

[alvinamorey]

It was common practice until somewhere in the 1980's for people to repair things. This disposible society is actually something new. The economy in the 50s thru the 80's was no worse than it is now, and selling parts was a business in itself. What we do now is fill dumps with tons of junk, and deplete our resources, while buying inferior products. I know that when I was a kid, my parents fixed everything they could, and in all honesty, life was much better then, and people in many ways had more money left over at the end of the week or month. Of course back then, people did not live to own the latest fads. I still have a TV that I bought around 1970, and it still works great. But now we are all faced with, and being forced into HiDef tv (which I could care less about). That's a large part of the problem, we are forced by greedy corporations to keep buying stuff. When MS comes out with a new OS, they force out many of the older computers, and now they are doing the same with our tvs, and who knows what else. I still use Win98 and have no intention to upgrade, and I dont even like the picture on a HDTV.

Ya, I am getting off track here, but I have a valid rant. The older I get, the less I want to change, particularly when that change is in most cases just to make some company wealthy, and does nothing to benefit me as the consumer. I find the newer MS OSs just bloated, and overly complicated with no benefits. And as I said, I like the picture on a standard tv much better than HDTV. Unfortunately, our younger people live to kiss the asses of these companies, because their generation is never satisfied with anything. So, these companies win, and us older people suffer as a result.

It's a sad state of affairs America has become......

Alvin

[Edwin Pawlowski]

Sorry to hear of your failing eye sight. Do the doctors give you any hope?

[alvinamorey]

It has nothing to do with my eyes. I might get a little "snow" on my analog tv, but snow is far less irritating than all those huge blotches and distortions on a HDTV when the signal is not 100%. Since I live in a rural area, and am many miles from the tv station, everyone around here has these poor pictures. Even on a DVD movie the picture is artificial looking. I just dont like HDTV. But what the heck. The government takes most of our money, they may as well take away our tvs too.

[Larry Bud]

I think you have some oddball bias that piggy backs on not having all correct information.

1) The government isn't forcing High Def. They're forcing digital. Not all digital is high def. They also not forcing you to buy a new TV. True, you'll need a converter for analog TVs that still are using OTA reception (if that's still you, you're in the vast minority), but it's not like you need to drop 2 grand on a new TV. 2) You don't need 100% signal for digital. There are also alternatives to picking it up OTA if you live too many miles from the station, including cable, or if you're still too far away from that, satellite. Now, I find it interesting that you complain about digital signals when you don't have digital service. Odd. 3) If you're basing your experience on friends, I've known MANY people that have their TVs set up COMPLETELY wrong. I dated this one chick that had a nice new 50" Sony HDTV, the Comcast guy hooked up the HD box, but she had it on the wrong input, and was still only receiving an analog-SD picture from the box. I clicked a couple of buttons on her TV, and I though her head was going to explode with the huge increased resolution change.

So what part of the HDTV picture don't you like? The increased resolution? The greater dynamic range of black vs. white? Increased color depth?

[Larry Bud]

So how is MS forcing you into a new operating system when you still happily use Win 98? I mean, you're using a 10 year old OS. Home PCs have only been around for 25 years or so.

What do you expect companies to do, stop developing the products they make? Should GM still be making a '57 Chevy? Should we all still have rotary telephones, using 300 baud modems? Still have tube black and white TVs?

Until Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Jack Tretton hold a gun to your head, they're not forcing you to do anything, as you've proven with your use of Win 98 and a standard def TV.

[Larry Bud]

Seriously, you must live in a dream world. There are very few servicable parts inside electronics now. In the 60's, you'd be lucky to have a few transistors in a device, and probably 90% of the components were capacitors and resistors. Which is why anything you bought took up half your living room.

Cut to the 2000s, where your entire life can be kept on a phone that neatly fits into your shirt pocket. A device that has a few tiny surface mount components which never go bad, and 2 or 3 ICs that also last forever (unless the phone happens to fall into the toilet!)

I'm all for fixing and tinkering, but we're in the very small minority. I fixed a home DVD player which happened to have a cap go bad (poor design, under rated component, as it was a common problem with this certain model). Of course, when the DVD player initially went bad, I bought a new one. One with some new great features (like the ability to play MPG and AVIs off a standard CD or DVD ROM), for $40. It took me longer to research the problem with the old DVD player, dig a cap out of my supply, and solder the new one in than it took to go to Best Buy and pick up my new fangled DVD player.

You don't HAVE to fix stuff now, because the replacement is dirt cheap to buy. While bad for the land fills, it's a GOOD thing for pretty much everything else.

On top of that, you STILL have electronic supply sources.. HUGE sources like DigiKey (my favorite) that ship out within 24 hours. Sometimes I get the stuff the next day.

[Bob F]

Nice 'clip', thereby missing the whole point of my humor.

Bob

[Jim Yanik]

" [e-mail]" wrote in news: [e-mail]:

if it's the same transistor that fails,you might try putting in a sturdier part,with higher ratings/better heatsinking.

Of course,that kills your repeat business....OOPS. ;-(

[Stormin Mormon]

American Science and Surplus

has some strange things like diodes. A lot of fun to look at the web site, also.

[Mark Lloyd]

[snip]

Just today I got a Wal-Mart ad that included a $30 DVD player.

I need those sometimes, such as for the solid-state relays I use in my holiday light control system (it also took a few 78L05 and MAX233 ICs and some capacitors).

[Dave Martindale]

Correction: broadcasters are being required to switch from analog transmission (which is very wasteful of radio spectrum once you consider the rules about adjacent channels (due to crappy UHF tuners)) to digital transmission which uses less spectrum. The broadcasters may use that to transmit HDTV, or multiple channels of game shows and reruns.

Your TV will continue to work fine playing content from your VCR or DVD player. If you want content off the air, you'll need an adapter box. But nothing forces you to buy a new TV.

Dave