Marking hex bits to make it easier to find the right one - anyone?

Couldn't agree more with the idea.

A number of years ago I painted rings round some of mine. Yellow, cyan, magenta (approximately). Just tedious cleaning them up enough for the paint to stick well. And then doing some more every time I buy any - or find some in another place I hadn't looked.

You've guessed - I just have a few left that have paint rings. And I can't remember what coding system I used.

I really don't understand why some standards haven't emerged.

You can buy them ready coloured.

Yes, I know, I said that in my original posting. Is there any sort of standard though?

Just to add my 2p worth: The boxes the bits come in and back to front. The hex part of the bits is held in the box, with the business end of the bit on display. So, you grab the bit with your fingers and insert it into the bit holder.

Turn them round, so the business end is held by the case, and the hex end sticks up. Then just push the bit holder onto the hex end of the bit. When finished with the bit, push it back into the box in the correct position, and release it from the bit holder.

Sounds like a plan. I suspect using the R code is going to be better than whatever colour code some bit makers use. For philips you might use the same basic colours but dilute them.

NT

Not really, spax use colours for size, wera use it to distinguish slotted/pozi/torx/hex/etc

I had a simialr situation with keys so decided to stamp them with a number. Perhaps hex keys though would be too tough to stamp.

I'd go for coloured heat shrink rather than paint. Maybe red for PZ2 and yellow for PZ3 (these being colours that I have to hand).

Yes, that's my intention, I have quite a good mix of heatshrink colours.

I remember the mnemonic Bye Bye Rosie On You Go Birmingham By Great Western (or Buy Better Resistors Or Your Grid Bias May Go West - Mauve rather than Violet). There's also Bad Boys Ring Our Young Girls But Vicky Goes Without or Bad Boys Ring Our Young Girls But Vicky Gives Willingly (anyone know Vicky's phone number?)

The difficult part is remember which way the Black and Brown go in the mnemonic!

very pc compared to the usual mnemonic

NT

Just remember it's a spectrum, so starts at black and ends in white.

Yes I've found by a bit of Googling that in the Bad Boys mnemonics, it's normally "rape" rather than "ring" ;-)

It had never occurred to me (and I feel a right pillock that it's taken me nearly 50 years for it to dawn on me) that the order of the colours for resistors was the same as the order in a spectrum (which I remember as Richard Of York Gained Battles In Vain) but with black, brown and grey, white either side of that.

Talking of mnemonics, how about this one for getting spelling of a certain difficult word correct: Died In A Rolls Royce Having Over-Eaten Again. I think it was either Gervase Phinn or Jack Sheffield who mentioned it in one of his books about things that little children say: allegedly one of his pupils had invented that mnemonic. In the US, the spelling is different so it would just be Having Eaten Again.

Golly after years of staring at resistors I dont need no mnemonics

Black is, by definition zero colour; white is all colours.

Neither do I, actually. Just offering advice.

Not just resistors, either, or other components. Mainframe circuit boards numbered with three plastic dots, etc.

Exactly! :-) (OP speaking) I remember doing colour blindness tests way back in the 1960s when I started work at Marconi Instruments in St. Albans.

A fellow student at college invented his own mnemonic which was British Boys Ride On Your Great Big Virgin Girls With Great Stamina.

As did I at nearby EAC:-) You might have met my schoolfriend, Ken Pyrah. His most notable feature was grey hair at age 17!