Quote:
Originally Posted by vortalexfan
Well the problem is that with digikey and Mouser, in order to get free shipping you have to make a minimum $80 order, and none of my orders ever reach that minimum.
Plus when I get old radios, record players or TVs to fix up, I never know what value of capacitors are going to be in it until I open it up or look up the service manual, and seeing as half the time when I get an old radio or record player from someone I don't know what the model is until it's in my hands.
So it's kind of hard to make a bulk order of capacitors when half the time I don't even know what I'm going to need until I get the radio, record player or tv.
So to me just ordering the capacitors once I know what I need makes more sense, seeing as no two radio, record player or TV circuits are the same when it comes to what parts they will need it's kind of hard to know what parts to order in bulk and what not to order in bulk.
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Ordering exactly what you would need in advance of purchase and no more is basically impossible, but there are good ways of estimating approximate future need...in the earliest days of my restoration (when I was 10-15 years old) I my folks would only take me to places I could buy parts 1-4 times a year...I made and never discarded shopping lists and when I started pre-stocking parts to be ready to fix 80 percent of sets immediately (even if randomly given to me that day) I estimated what I need to stock in bulk by tallying up how many of each part I bought in a year's time and or how much I bought since I started and the hand full of values I needed most were the first to be bulk stocked.
Things less commonly needed like resistors you can if you keep your eyes open at swapmeets periodically find large assortments of for cheap....near the end of my no money period I found a couple of lots like that which I'm only now deleting to the point where I'm considering buying an assortment of new parts to replace (NOS carbon comp resistors sometimes are just as troublesome as the originals).