So I finally got serious and decided to sort out my resistor mess. Some time in my first year of studying electronics I purchased an assorted bag of resistors from Jaycar. None of them had any markings on the paper retaining tape stuff, my lack of motivation for sorting them ended up in them being stored in a box and essentially forgotten about.

The process of identifying the resistors was a combination of the little jig I cobbled together with my helping hands and my meter probes. Although my Fluke 12 has an autorange it’s not the most accurate meter I’ve ever used so I kept my colour code chart nearby to check. If you ever want to learn the resistor colour codes sorting a bag of resistors like this is a decent way to burn it into memory.

I chose to sort my resistors into the E12 series as the assorted bag I bought had essentially every value. There were certainly some casualties from the years stored in a box but now I’ve managed to get most of them in order. After making a mess of the kitchen table and getting my resistors in order I also cleared out space in the cabinet for some of my other components. I allocated some extra little draws for individually bagged ceramic capacitors, diodes, inductors, crystals, transistors and other parts that I have less of.