Maplin

Yes, that's really rather what I meant - sorry if I was unclear. Curry's would showcase all that stuff, sell it to you there and then if you wanted, but otherwise encourage you to buy it from them online.

We were up at Bexley last Saturday, and went to Bluewater later to look for duvet covers and see whether JLewis stocked a Humax satellite box (they did and it was cheaper than Amazon, go figure). In their TV dept, they have all the TV brands and what appear to be sales people from those brands, too.

of course they are. The through hole ones, which are plentiful in e-scrap, are easier & quicker though.

NT

There have been a few shops turned into flats near where I live. And my borough has just been voted cultural captial whatever that means. I wonder if it means that cutting down tress to put on a cycle path and slowing the traffic to 20 MPH on the main roads is good for the envioment or their pockets.

sistor-module-ky-018

. I'm betting he;ll say he doesn't know how to connect them up as a potenti al divider. :-

some can;t use breadboard , I found some veroboard stripboard in the lab wh ere a student hasb soldered the components to the wrong side of the board i .e the none copper strip side.

But we do have some good students just not as good as they were 15 years ag o.

Russ and his oxygen free pure copper wire spun by virgin mermaids in an inert atmosphere is expensive junk. But if it keeps them out of mischief then it is harmless enough. Caveat emptor and all that!

There could easily be a difference between how a particular blueray player sounds using its own DAC and analogue signal paths to an amplifier and purely digital path to amplifier and the amplifiers DACs. Which one sounds the better is a matter of how well engineered the analogue signal path is between the DAC output and the preamplifier.

I have even seen one expensive amplified speaker that doesn't work at all with some relatively high end optical digital signal sources. Unclear why not - the cheaper model works OK with the same feed.

The worst bit of the entire audio chain are the mechanical transducers at the end of it (and the listening room acoustics).

Tesla makes a profit? It is merely Elon Musk's hobby.

Given how cheap new components are, I'm surprised you can be bothered. I can't.

Resistors cost me about a penny each. Really not worth raking round lots of old boards looking for a suitable one then removing it - only to find the leads are too short.

Not sure about that. There seem to be more magazines on the rack than ever before (although a few that used to be are misisng/amalgamated).

I once made the mistake of going to B&Q on a Bank Holiday. Never again!

AFAICT it was a prototype design for the inner circle of Hell.

Which bit of 'they cannot solder and can only use a breadboard' did you not understand?

Most of my escrap consists of multi legged beasties that do whatever the functionality of the device is and a few buffers LEDs and a dedicated display LCD. Almost none of it reusable without a lot of effort.

The days are long gone when you could buy scrap chunks of TLL laden boards to get basic parts. These days you get a few discrete components and capacitors that are already life expired and probably the cause of unit failure. PC motherboards with capacitors swollen and at a rakish angle are a telltale of why it stopped working. I have mended a few.

You can buy known working parts from Rapid in chunks of £40 a throw complete with datasheets with "free" next day delivery. Time was when RadioSpares wouldn't deal with you unless you had your company name up in lights next to an A-road. Those days are long gone. Lock Distribution were more laid back dealing with start-ups. Whatever happened to them?

"Buy better loudspeakers." The only HiFi mantra you need.

obviously. But some parts are still worthwhile. And hobbyists aren't looking to earn good money. And it's way less time to get something from a junkbox than go find it online or go to a counter.

I have both new & used parts in stock. Resistor kits are cheap etc - kinda pointless to tell you how to get parts.

NT

-resistor-module-ky-018

tor. I'm betting he;ll say he doesn't know how to connect them up as a pote ntial divider. :-

empty bit of PCB... which then has legs. Ie you could plug the ORP12 in jus t as well as you could plug the 'module' in. It's the total antithesis to b asic sane engineering.

e arduino pi youngster crowd are wholly unable to take that on board.

ORP12s & their relatives go into solderless breadboard just as well as thos e pointless modules. Which part of that did you not understand?

NT

you're keeping the wrong scrap for a hobbyist then.

yup, boards with lots of TH parts are free now. As are the not so useful ones you describe.

NT

But doesn't the use of a soldering iron and copper breadboard only require 15 minutes of teaching/instruction? Shouldn't this be part of a students education in your establishment? Perhaps also add a thin manual showing good and bad solder joints and the reason why to adopt good practice.

But the reviews would have been performed by journalists and their hearing has deteriorated over the 40 years they've been in the business.

They need to learn how to use a solder-sucker too.

Without these basic skills I wouldn't have been able to re-cap the x-overs in my speakers a couple of years ago.

A few places seem to have realised that the pensioner pound is a massive source of disposable money.

Not sure about that. Many seem to be paying a higher proportion of their income in rent than I did for a mortgage. And you have to rent for ever - a mortgage generally comes to an end. One reason why so many retired home owners have a large disposable income even on a modest pension.