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

Components are so tiny these days that I often have difficulty telling orange from red from brown in the tiny bands. And then you have 1% and

Yes, I have the same problem. I use a jeweller's loupe quite a lot; I can hold it in my eye for a long time due to practice with the monocle!

I too use a multimeter, also for small value capacitors, because some of the markings are ambiguous.

It is alleged that women, on average, can determine finer differences between near-identical colours than men. I've seen tests on web sites where you are presented with several patches of colour, all of them identical apart from one which is very slightly different.

I'm not sure whether the ability to see "that dress on the internet"

When I worked in a chemistry lab as a research assistant in my year off between A levels and university, we were doing a lot of work with adding tracers to proteins - either radioactive or colour-change. My supervisor asked me "are you colour blind?", and when I said I wasn't, he told me about my predecessor who kept getting different colour changes to those reported in scientific papers. Eventually my supervisor looked over this guy's shoulder and found that the colour changes were exactly as expected... but the assistant was reporting them wrongly. "Oh, I'm colour blind - does it matter?" he asked, innocently. Does it matter - just a little ;-)

Apparently the change in UK wiring colours from Red, Black, Green to Brown, Blue, Green-and-Yellow (L, N, E) was partly for the benefit of colour blind electricians: with most forms of colour blindness, the new colours appear differently to each other, whereas the old colours made live and earth appear very similar.

I remember hearing a colour blind person saying that he could not distinguish between red and green traffic lights and had to rely entirely by position, so he had to be extra careful at night when he couldn't see *at a distance* whether there were two unlit lights above the one that he could see was lit, to give context. That's partly why many (all?) traffic lights now have a white rectangular border around the three-light head so you can infer the position of the light that you can see.

I couldn't rememeber the usual mnemonics, I found it easier to rember the colours but one going around my school (perhaps Harry started it) was

Black Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Vrigins Grow Wise.

It's been years since I've seen pink on a resitor IIRC if the last band was pink it meant 20% tolerence.

those dipped polyxx capacitors that had IIRC red for 250V and yellow for 400V working.

Life was so colourful, now I need a magnifier just to see the surface mount componets.

We get asked to make circuit boards such as.

--------- Please find the attached files for an antenna we would like to fabricate. The design is simple and the holes do not need to be plated. The board thickness is 0.787mm and I will give it to you by today.

ah, 'dire rear'.

NT

I thought they just had no band for 20%

Now we have LED traffic lights, we should change the red stop to be octagonal.

Shortly before colour TV started we had a very interesting conversation with our RS rep who revealed that he was colour blind. However, although he couldn't see colour, he could see minor variations that normally sight folk can't.

He said that when he visited Ford's factory at Dagenham he walked past the production line and would often spot a car and think "I don't know what colour it is but some poor beggar is going to by a car with different colour doors to the body!"

This was very useful during the war. He was part of an experiment involving a group of colour blind men and an equal number with normal sight. The RAF took them on a circular flight of Britain that took in several camoflaged sites.

He and his group spotted all of them whereas the other group spotted none!

I'm puzzled by this thread as all my hex bits (from a number of sets) are all stamped Pz1, Pz2, Ph1, Ph2 etcetera, so I don't see the problem.

Also, I always keep them in their holders in groups in sequence, so I can usually pick the correct one without needing the markings.

The version I learned ended But Virgins Go Without

I had heard something similar; where colour blind cards are setup to catch various groups with certain forms of colour blindness, where a normally sighted person will not see a number of pattern, but one with certain kinds of colour blindness will.

I do find it horrifying that there are people out there driving who can't tell the difference between a green or red light.

... except that at Westinghouse in Chippenham it was not boys but bastards.

what would cause that, trichromic but one of the spectral peaks in a different place to usual?

There's a lot worse out there. Just beware.

NT

AOL St. Albans 1961. The company was re-located WWII from London which may have accounted for some strange practices.

Which is why traffic light heads now have a white rectangle around them so the *position* of any of the three lights can be inferred in relation to the rectangle, even if the colour itself is unknown.

Some countries use different shaped lights: eg square for red, diamond for amber, circular for green in Quebec and Nova Scotia provinces, Canada.

It's not part of the Driving Test amd one in 10 men is colour blind in some way

Most of the white borders had fallen off round here, last I noticed ...

Mine are marked like that too but those markings are very difficult to see when selecting a bit from a box or trying to spot what bit there is in a holder.

Yes, I have some stored that way but an aid to quickly selecting the right one would save time.