BDD-- my apologies. I replied to your post, accidentally clicking "Edit" instead of "Quote" (as moderator I can edit others' posts, but per Mike's request, I don't, even when it's awfully tempting to fix a typo or something) and then when trying to fix my mistake, I deleted your post. What it said was:
Quote:
Quote:
I always buy extras, which is partly why I have a quarter of a million parts in my office at home.
A quarter million? Surely you must be exaggerating just a tiny bit.
and my reply was:
I came to that number some time back, and I don't remember how. The cheapest ones would be a couple hundred resistors of each of 180 values, followed by 144 values of capacitors. Actually, I have whole reels of some of the values. I have thousands of ICs in at least 230 types. Add connectors, crystals, trimmer pots, LEDs, IC sockets, transistors, diodes, switches, hardware, crimps, fuses, etc., and pretty soon you're talking about a lot of parts. A few weeks ago my wife's 10-year-old grand-niece came in and saw the parts cabinets, workbenches, and equipment, and said, "This is like--like--heaven! I could just
live in here!" (I doubt that the 60 shelf-feet of books or all the dust contributed to that comment.)
Edit, Jan 2014: I recently spent a few hours in the garage looking for something, and I'd have to say there are at least another half million components there, although 2/3 of that is thru-hole resistors (mostly 1/8 watt) which aren't of much value now that production electronics are all SMT. There's at least a cubic foot of just pin headers and probably more, many boxes of relays, plus other stuff.