I'm convinced many teachers go out of their way to make tutorials as dense and confusing as possible. Thankfully you don't: this has been the simplest, most logical key to unlocking the archaic Value Code of the Resistor that I've yet to encounter. Thanks for relieving the pain in my newbie head. Good stuff!
Spectrum: ROY G. BIV preceded by black and then brown then followed by the Torrance band of silver (10%) or gold (5%).. And God curse the genius who decided blue colored and 5-band coding was a good idea!
Wow, it's fascinating how something so complex and difficult could be so easy when explained or taught right,you are amazing, thank you very much for all the info.
In Marine Corps electronics school we learned the following ditty to learn the color codes: Bad boys ravage our young girls but Violet gives willingly...get some now. I am 73 and learned this in 1965 when I was 19. It has stuck with me all the years.
In 2020 I put together a kit form of a calculator which as a function for resistors. The colours are at the bottom of the number keys. You key them in from the resistor colour bars and it gives you the value. Great for me :) You videos are very informative Mr Carlson, thanks very much :)
im just learning and vloggers like u making quality vids easy to learn and understand are very much appreciated. thankyou for your time, effort and sharing.
Mr Carlson.you are a legend I'm taking my intermediate ham radio exam Sept 6 2020 and will need to know this in order to pass and thanks to you and the elegantly explained way you work out the values of resistors,its made far easier to understand and digest.thank you so much and keep up the good work you are doing educating those who are interested in electronics.i have watched you're videos for years and learning all the time.best regards to you mr carlson.73 for now ;)
Came by to refresh my memory on resistor color codes. Thank you, very helpful. I had electronics/electricity class in high school back during my Junior (1984-85) and Senior ('85-'86) years, 3 hours/day and 2 hours/day respectively. I remembered the mnemonic but forgot some of the details. Enjoyed reading a schematic and making a pictorial diagram then making a PCB with paint and acid. First project: continuity tester
I have just found this video (21/02/19) and I want to thank you for taking the time to explain and make it easy for us to better understand resistor (and mica caps) colour code. I have subbed you channel as I am interested in, but have only a basic knowledge of electronics,- especially the solid state stuff. So, Thank You for taking the time to do this. Greetings from Australia.
I just ran across this on 9-13-2018 and found very interesting. my mother was an electronics technician first with Bendix Radio in Towson Md starting in the middle 40s where she built her first television. She told me it never had a cabinet, just the chassis and the picture tube. Being born in 1955, I don't remember ever seeing it. In the middle 50s she started at Westinghouse Aerospace outside of Baltimore.When I was an early teen my mother taught me some of what you are talking about here but I was more worried about playing ball. What a huge loss for me. I she was smarter than I gave her credit for. That's not even getting into the vacuum tubes. In this day in age most people take it for granted that you turn on the radio and it plays ext. I find it amazing the genius that it took just invent any of this stuff. Thanks you for helping understand how to read the resistor again.
I agree with this video. Your way of reading low value resistors does eliminate the need to know that when gold is the multiplier, you multiply by .1 and when it is silver, you multiply by .01. This way that you are doing it makes it much faster indeed. Thanks for the tip.
I took a college EE lab course in which all of the used quarter-watt resistors were thrown into a box at the end of each lab period. At the end of the semester, I acquired this wadded mass of thousands of resistors for my own use. During the process of organizing all of them, I managed to drill into my head both the color code and the E24 series. This video was helpful because I had always thought of gold and silver multipliers as x0.1 and x0.01 - exactly as they are stated on a color code chart. It's certainly more intuitive to think in terms of "over 1 ohm" and "under 1 ohm". No mental math needed.
+Eric Wasatonic That's a great way to learn resistor color codes. Many years ago, an old TV tech gave me thousands of brand new carbon comp resistors in a box. I dumped them out on the kitchen table and sorted every one to a marked bin with drawers. After that, at a mere glance, I could recognize all the values. Sounds like we have done things somewhat similar. Glad you enjoyed the video Eric! Always look forward to your video's as well.
I love the way you explain the color code chart! I used to do Business Machine Repair in High School, and the Color Chart was something I needed to brush up on. "Thank You Very Much!"
For the first time since the early 1930's, "Ms. Violet" is breathing a sigh of relief!! Very informative, an excellent primer which should help those in the repair field, and those working through instruction in electronics. I've been working with those darn mica caps since '74, and believe me, this will help, many thanks!
+AMStationEngineer I used to do a morning drive time show on an AM station (AM 1620!). I had to quit, though, because every time I drove under a bridge I lost my voice. (The first sentence is true; the second...?)
EdWatts Mr Carlson's Lab Yes, but the "hometown nature" of AM radio stations makes up for the noisy nature of AM. In a few years, unfortunately, all radio will be satellite, and totally non-terrestrial.
Hey Ed, The reason you lost your voice is, you need more family members in the car with you on that morning drive....... That way there would be a few more Watts available :^) ... See what I did there.
Paul this is a great easy way of learning, I always get the meter out to test because I thought this would be to hard to memorize. thank you, MR Mioggi !!!
Thank you. I remember reading resistors a long time ago, and remembered the rhyme in my head and the tolerance band, I think I had forgotten about 3rd band gold = above 1 ohm and silver below. Tha is for jogging my old memory!
Thank you for making the best explained video that I have seen as of yet on the resistors, capacitors codes. It finally all clicked after watching this, thanks again, Tom.
I repaired TVS for years I had heart surgery a few years ago that caused me some unreal memory loss your videos are very helpful Mr Carlson thanks for sharing.
You always make your videos fun to watch even though I made my first radio repair work bench out of a old wooden door in the attic of my family's home over 60 yrs ago. TKS 73 Leo
A special thank you to Mr. Carlson for all his videos and all the time spent in doing them. I have expertise in software for 30 years but normally don't get to experience electronics and in the good video representation Paul can do it in. I want to let you and everyone know that you have made a difference in my understandings and on a business perspective a more dangerous competitor. (Not against you of course).Paul this is going to be the similar message as Peter gets as he wakes up but I assure you it has exact equal meaning.
Oh thank goodness, thank you so much this is an excellent tutorial! I've been watching through like 20 videos and none have explained from the beginning for people who don't know what they're doing! Like how do you even know which end to start from! Like for me that actual calculations is very straightforward just which end is the beginning?! I kept getting: "start with the first band"!??!? On some types in how to read resistor tutorial you got to teach them how to read a resistor from the beginning, I just don't understand how some people missed the necessity of that..!
I just want to express my gratitude in the first 5 minutes you made something so complicated a piece of cake we need more of you in the world . thanks again
Gosh mr. Carlson, thank you, I used to think it must be complicated and I had to use one of those little wheels thingies or read a chart every time... but it isn't, you made it simple, thank you
Hi I've just found your Chanel and watched many of your videos, just wanted to say a big thank you for turning a complicated subject into plain English. I'm a last able to get a grasp on the subject. Where many other videos and books have left me more confused after reading/watching them 👍🏽
G'day. As a subscriber to your channel, i enjoy your videos. But also, having done my electronics course 16yrs ago, watching the videos like this one, and the capacitor video have helped me remember all my electronic fundamentals again.
Thank you very much I am learning circuitry and soldering later then I would have liked to but I'm trying to do it now and what you just shared is amazing and it is definitely move me forward as far as building my own service again thank you
Thanks for all the informative videos! I used to dabble in tube type shortwave and audio amp repair myself. I never tried to tackle solid state stuff (like a multimeter?!) but you make that look so easy I'm going to dust off my old equipment and give something a try. (too bad I threw out a broken Ross multiband a few years back, I'd love to have that one working like it did back in the day) Your presentation is excellent, and you make difficult concepts easy to follow, you have quite the talent as an educator. I enjoy your videos so much I'm thinking 'who needs cable TV?' Seriously. I've watched maybe a total of 2 hours of TV over the last few months, and that out of sheer boredom. (American Pickers and Antiques Road Show) I've could easily spend10 times that watching your videos, in fact I plan on it! :) I wish this internet thing was around when my 2 boys were growing up. They'd know a thing or two by now....
In my experience, there isn't a lot of consistency with square or rectangularly packaged capacitors and their dot codes. It makes things challenging at times. The other big challenge is that the paint used for the dots has shifted hue over the decades, making a brown look an awful lot like orange or red, an so forth. Often times, I have to get a q-tip and clean the dots with alcohol, or even acetone to clear away gunk and often an oxidized layer of the old paint to make the dots readable.
+Jason Atkin I agree Jason. This is the "most standard" way of reading them. There are a few cheaper types where they didn't even have the dots to put paint in, they just dab a bit of paint on the edges. Alcohol does clean them up nicely.
I learned the resistor color code by the politically incorrect bad boys etc etc rhyme. Mica caps always give me fits but not anymore. Thanks for taking the time to make the video. It's much appreciated
+Michael Lloyd ...BAD BOYS RAPE OUR YOUNG GIRLS BUT VIOLET GIVES WILLINGLY, SHE'S GOOD REALLY...that's the color code:MORIZE IT! After a short time you'll just look at the colors and see the values intuitively!
+Jon Milliren The thing that bothers me the most is that I don't remember her name being Violet but maybe that's another story for another time (or never) :D
Resistor are measured in Ohms, K Ohms, M Ohms. All resistors are measured in ohms. K Ohms are resistors that have a value of 1 thousand ohms or more. M ohms are resistors with 1 million Ohms or more. The first resistor in this video had a value of 2700 Ohms, because the resistor value is more than 1 thousand ohms, it is written as 2.7K Ohms. Excellent Video, very intuitive.
Hello Mr. Carlson. I always think of the multiplier as the number of zeros to throw on the end. To keep from getting mixed up when I read the low values I keep in mind that gold is worth more than silver so yellow violet gold is 4.7 ohm and yellow violet silver is .47 ohm. The first time I saw 1% resistors it threw me for a loop that there were four bands instead of three for the resistance. For example brown black red red, 10200 ohm. Great job as always.
This was a great video, and I learned a lot. The only problem is that I am shade color blind so I have a real problem see the colors on the resistors. I have no problem figuring the values as long as you give me the colors; so on my own I will never be able to calculate the values. Thanks again and I really enjoyed the video.
Hello Paul! I learned via "old school" from a salty, old rascal. Have you ever heard, "Bad boys r...etc...Get some now?" That jingle has stayed in my mind all these years. Thanks for the video!
+Beretta96Dan Yeah, but that's really the hard way; those who learned that mnemonic device without "going to the next level" are always counting on their fingers as they recite the sentence. It's better to just learn the color code without any crutches. By the way, I learned "GOLD" and "SILVER" as a separate sentence -- "Good Stuff!"
I have a very old used Mica capacitor(condenser) that is leftover from my late father's box of stuff he had from his days as an apprentice for RCA. It is small deep brown brick - - and following your instructions I read it as 410 picoFarads with a 2% tolerance rating. The paint on the colored dots has worn off so it is hard to read. The Cx on my multimeter indicates ~400 picoFarads. The colored dot pattern looks like Yel Brn Blk Red - - following the directions you described here
Having worked electronics all my life 40yrs of career and prior that it was my go-to hobby in school.... I learned the color code a real long time ago but thing is i've always applied it to everything around me so sometimes people will (as example) ask a question what color was that car and i'll just blurt out "5" and then explain i meant green.... I even recently went to buy some general use spray bomb paint and the hardware counter guy asked what color and i without even thinking just came out with "3" ... which left him looking a bit stunned....
Many thanks for the tech tip, somehow this just made more sense to my brain and I'm glad I watched. Now if I could only find a wad of miscellaneous resistors to separate into marked bins for practice, I'd be set :)
Many domino style caps don't have that information on them, so if one is faulty, I replace it with a standard 500 Volt 1% modern Mica cap. Or.... I really like NPO-C0G, thats:C Zero G capacitors.
Gosh, your tech tips are phenomenal - I do really mean that. Do you host online classes on Udemy or some other platform, if so I want to purchase your course. I really love electronics, I am still learning and your pace and approach to presenting the material is extraordinary. I know this video is about 7 years old as of this writing and I did take a look at your most recent video titles and well, they appear to be interesting but those most recent videos don't appear to focus on these basics. I am subscribed and the bell is on. I look forward to your videos. Thank you so much!
New subscriber here. Thanks so much for your videos. I've learned a lot watching them, I think possibly enough to start restoring my old RCA cathedral battery radio.
I recently bought 3 new stereo amplifier boards from China & one of them had a wrong value resistor on one channel from the factory. They are some new type resistor color code with more bands. It was 1/4 watt with colors: Green Brown Black Brown Brown. After researching, = 510x10= 5.1kΩ 1% That took a while to figure out. Thank you for covering those domino caps as well. Take care.
This is really helpful , thank you for posting this and taking the time to record it. I agree it is really simple this way and will for sure help me doing this faster... Mica caps is perhaps the best lesson here.. I never knew how to read them.... Brilliant, thank you Mr Carlson :) - Ron
Very few. The ones that stand out were in a Telefunken Panadaptor, and a Johnson Viking Valiant transmitter. There are probably more, but it would have been long ago. So usually they are pretty dependable.
My issue isn't figuring it out from the colors, but those blue mica resistors make it incredibly difficult to actually see WHAT the colors are. Whoever came up with that idea should be fired! (why not a white resistor?)
Thanks! Now I'm a bit more experienced I need to probably need read these resistors properly, I can compare them for similarity but I need to know them exact. thanks alot.
I'm slightly colourblind,so i always have a magnifying glass with white led built in to see the colour clearly,but once i know th colours i can read em pretty fast, great vdeo nonethless!
This is an older video but I still enjoyed it nonetheless. I understood the concept of the multiplier as being zeroes but silver and gold as the multiplier left me thinking "huh...whodathunkit?" Great instruction!
Awesome video thank you this is a lot of help I’m just starting with electronics so learning what I can . The basics is were I’m at right now but really enjoying learning ,
I'm convinced many teachers go out of their way to make tutorials as dense and confusing as possible. Thankfully you don't: this has been the simplest, most logical key to unlocking the archaic Value Code of the Resistor that I've yet to encounter. Thanks for relieving the pain in my newbie head. Good stuff!
Spectrum: ROY G. BIV preceded by black and then brown then followed by the Torrance band of silver (10%) or gold (5%)..
And God curse the genius who decided blue colored and 5-band coding was a good idea!
There is no way to express the gratitude I feel from your simplification of this subject matter.
Wow, it's fascinating how something so complex and difficult could be so easy when explained or taught right,you are amazing, thank you very much for all the info.
In Marine Corps electronics school we learned the following ditty to learn the color codes:
Bad boys ravage our young girls but Violet gives willingly...get some now. I am 73 and learned this in 1965 when I was 19. It has stuck with me all the years.
Same in the USN except for the ravage. We called it something else
That’s exactly the ditty I was taught. My teacher was retired Air Force.
BRO WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I WAS IN MY LAST COLLEGE SEMESTER?!?!?! I COULDA FUCKING SAVED SO MUCH GODDAMN TIME NOOOOOOO
@@KillerSpoon575 ha i used a similar code to remember the first 10 elements on the chart
In 2020 I put together a kit form of a calculator which as a function for resistors.
The colours are at the bottom of the number keys. You key them in from the resistor colour bars and it gives you the value.
Great for me :) You videos are very informative Mr Carlson, thanks very much :)
Wish I had you as my electronics instructor way back when. You make understanding and clarifying electronics considerably!
im just learning and vloggers like u making quality vids easy to learn and understand are very much appreciated. thankyou for your time, effort and sharing.
Happy to help!
Mr Carlson.you are a legend I'm taking my intermediate ham radio exam Sept 6 2020 and will need to know this in order to pass and thanks to you and the elegantly explained way you work out the values of resistors,its made far easier to understand and digest.thank you so much and keep up the good work you are doing educating those who are interested in electronics.i have watched you're videos for years and learning all the time.best regards to you mr carlson.73 for now ;)
Thanks for your kind comment!
Came by to refresh my memory on resistor color codes. Thank you, very helpful. I had electronics/electricity class in high school back during my Junior (1984-85) and Senior ('85-'86) years, 3 hours/day and 2 hours/day respectively. I remembered the mnemonic but forgot some of the details. Enjoyed reading a schematic and making a pictorial diagram then making a PCB with paint and acid. First project: continuity tester
Thank you.
Clear instruction without a bunch of music is superb.
Thank you again.
All my life I was wondering why the colors on these resistors thank you very much mr Carlson for blessing us with these videos
I have just found this video (21/02/19) and I want to thank you for taking the time to explain and make it easy for us to better understand resistor (and mica caps) colour code.
I have subbed you channel as I am interested in, but have only a basic knowledge of electronics,- especially the solid state stuff.
So, Thank You for taking the time to do this.
Greetings from Australia.
Welcome Peter!
As a newbie to electronics, this is a great source of knowledge, thank you taking the time to make these vids.
You are a better teacher than any other TH-camrs i have encountered thank you so much ❤
You're welcome 😊
I just ran across this on 9-13-2018 and found very interesting. my mother was an electronics technician first with Bendix Radio in Towson Md starting in the middle 40s where she built her first television. She told me it never had a cabinet, just the chassis and the picture tube. Being born in 1955, I don't remember ever seeing it. In the middle 50s she started at Westinghouse Aerospace outside of Baltimore.When I was an early teen my mother taught me some of what you are talking about here but I was more worried about playing ball. What a huge loss for me. I she was smarter than I gave her credit for. That's not even getting into the vacuum tubes. In this day in age most people take it for granted that you turn on the radio and it plays ext. I find it amazing the genius that it took just invent any of this stuff. Thanks you for helping understand how to read the resistor again.
Thank you for sharing your story MrHans!
I agree with this video. Your way of reading low value resistors does eliminate the need to know that when gold is the multiplier, you multiply by .1 and when it is silver, you multiply by .01. This way that you are doing it makes it much faster indeed. Thanks for the tip.
after watching other videos. i just learned how to read the resistor the easiest way on your video. thank you.
for 60 years i feared learning basic electronics and you made it so easy i thank you . well keep it up share your knowlege
I took a college EE lab course in which all of the used quarter-watt resistors were thrown into a box at the end of each lab period. At the end of the semester, I acquired this wadded mass of thousands of resistors for my own use. During the process of organizing all of them, I managed to drill into my head both the color code and the E24 series.
This video was helpful because I had always thought of gold and silver multipliers as x0.1 and x0.01 - exactly as they are stated on a color code chart. It's certainly more intuitive to think in terms of "over 1 ohm" and "under 1 ohm". No mental math needed.
+Eric Wasatonic
That's a great way to learn resistor color codes. Many years ago, an old TV tech gave me thousands of brand new carbon comp resistors in a box. I dumped them out on the kitchen table and sorted every one to a marked bin with drawers. After that, at a mere glance, I could recognize all the values. Sounds like we have done things somewhat similar. Glad you enjoyed the video Eric! Always look forward to your video's as well.
I memorized the color code resistors salvaging discarded 1950~1970's TV and radio sets as a hobby.
I agree!
I didn't know about the 'below 10 ohms' codes. This little bit of knowledge is a nice 71st birthday present. Thank you very much.
+Silas Fatchett
Glad you enjoyed Silas. Happy Birthday!
I love the way you explain the color code chart! I used to do Business Machine Repair in High School, and the Color Chart was something I needed to brush up on. "Thank You Very Much!"
For the first time since the early 1930's, "Ms. Violet" is breathing a sigh of relief!!
Very informative, an excellent primer which should help those in the repair field, and those working through instruction in electronics. I've been working with those darn mica caps since '74, and believe me, this will help, many thanks!
+AMStationEngineer
Thanks for the kind words!
+AMStationEngineer
I used to do a morning drive time show on an AM station (AM 1620!). I had to quit, though, because every time I drove under a bridge I lost my voice. (The first sentence is true; the second...?)
EdWatts Mr Carlson's Lab Yes, but the "hometown nature" of AM radio stations makes up for the noisy nature of AM. In a few years, unfortunately, all radio will be satellite, and totally non-terrestrial.
That will be a sad day!
Hey Ed, The reason you lost your voice is, you need more family members in the car with you on that morning drive....... That way there would be a few more Watts available :^) ... See what I did there.
Tnx for this overview I been ham for 35 yrs and never understood this just used chart. Wish I had known. Thank you!
Paul this is a great easy way of learning, I always get the meter out to test because I thought this would be to hard to memorize. thank you, MR Mioggi !!!
+jeff b
Any time Jeff! Glad you enjoyed.
Thank you for taking to make this video. Each time I look a resistor I just give up on it, now I begin to see how it works.
Thank you. I remember reading resistors a long time ago, and remembered the rhyme in my head and the tolerance band, I think I had forgotten about 3rd band gold = above 1 ohm and silver below. Tha is for jogging my old memory!
Thank you for making the best explained video that I have seen as of yet on the resistors, capacitors codes. It finally all clicked after watching this, thanks again, Tom.
You're Welcome Thomas!
Excellent , used your method of testing transistors (divide the transistor into two diodes ) works a treat ! Many thanks.
Wonderful advice! I'm starting to learn this as a hobby and that short-cut helps me feel less of a dummy!
Thanks!
I repaired TVS for years I had heart surgery a few years ago that caused me some unreal memory loss your videos are very helpful Mr Carlson thanks for sharing.
+wade hicks
Glad to help wade! Sorry to read about your memory loss.
*The best teacher in town*
+MrMac5150
Thanks for the kind words MrMac!
Mr Carlson's Lab
True words.
You always make your videos fun to watch even though I made my first radio repair work bench out of a old wooden door in the attic of my family's home over 60 yrs ago. TKS 73 Leo
+K1ZEK
Glad you enjoyed the video Leo!
wow, I remember learning my color code from Forest Mims' books. The Domino part was extremely valuable to me, BIG Thanks! I won't forget it!
+su pyrow
Glad you enjoyed, your welcome!
A special thank you to Mr. Carlson for all his videos and all the time spent in doing them. I have expertise in software for 30 years but normally don't get to experience electronics and in the good video representation Paul can do it in. I want to let you and everyone know that you have made a difference in my understandings and on a business perspective a more dangerous competitor. (Not against you of course).Paul this is going to be the similar message as Peter gets as he wakes up but I assure you it has exact equal meaning.
+Ham4Ham
Thanks for your comment!
Indeed thumbs up Paul for the wonder full insight on reading resistor color codes. Never thought it was that easy...
Oh thank goodness, thank you so much this is an excellent tutorial!
I've been watching through like 20 videos and none have explained from the beginning for people who don't know what they're doing!
Like how do you even know which end to start from!
Like for me that actual calculations is very straightforward just which end is the beginning?!
I kept getting: "start with the first band"!??!?
On some types in how to read resistor tutorial you got to teach them how to read a resistor from the beginning, I just don't understand how some people missed the necessity of that..!
I just want to express my gratitude in the first 5 minutes you made something so complicated a piece of cake we need more of you in the world . thanks again
You are so welcome!
Gosh mr. Carlson, thank you, I used to think it must be complicated and I had to use one of those little wheels thingies or read a chart every time... but it isn't, you made it simple, thank you
You are very welcome!
Hi I've just found your Chanel and watched many of your videos, just wanted to say a big thank you for turning a complicated subject into plain English. I'm a last able to get a grasp on the subject. Where many other videos and books have left me more confused after reading/watching them 👍🏽
GREAT, Never knew how to read caps untill today. Thanks Mr. C
G'day. As a subscriber to your channel, i enjoy your videos. But also, having done my electronics course 16yrs ago, watching the videos like this one, and the capacitor video have helped me remember all my electronic fundamentals again.
Glad your enjoying the video's!
Thank you for the refresher on what I forgot many years ago! Thanks for all the very interesting videos.
+greg nissen
Your welcome Greg!
Nice demonstration to keep me on my toes Paul; yes! I did pass, some habits never leave, particularly when you remain active in the field.
Outstanding refresher! Thank you for yet another excellent Tech Tip Tuesday.
+XT500C
Glad you enjoyed. Thanks for the kind words too!
Great easy to understand and follow teaching. Thanks. Glad to subscribe.
THANK YOU! Great video, easy to understand and concise. Nice work- very appreciated!
So far, the best explanation I have found.
As a returning ham, this was good revision for me, thank-you.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you very much for these vids. Your tutorials and tips are super clear and perfect! Always enjoy them!
+Harindu Gamlath
Your welcome Harindu!
I just got into robotics and manufacturing and you made something that looks so hard become so easy.
This video, to be honest, helped me a lot. Thanks a lot man. I really appreciate it.
Great Tech Tip on color codes Paul!
+TRXBench
Thanks Peter!
Incredibly simple! Loving these videos!
Great! Thanks for your feedback.
Thank you for taking time out of your day for this!
Thank you very much I am learning circuitry and soldering later then I would have liked to but I'm trying to do it now and what you just shared is amazing and it is definitely move me forward as far as building my own service again thank you
Thanks for all the informative videos! I used to dabble in tube type shortwave and audio amp repair myself. I never tried to tackle solid state stuff (like a multimeter?!) but you make that look so easy I'm going to dust off my old equipment and give something a try. (too bad I threw out a broken Ross multiband a few years back, I'd love to have that one working like it did back in the day)
Your presentation is excellent, and you make difficult concepts easy to follow, you have quite the talent as an educator. I enjoy your videos so much I'm thinking 'who needs cable TV?' Seriously. I've watched maybe a total of 2 hours of TV over the last few months, and that out of sheer boredom. (American Pickers and Antiques Road Show) I've could easily spend10 times that watching your videos, in fact I plan on it! :)
I wish this internet thing was around when my 2 boys were growing up. They'd know a thing or two by now....
Thanks for your kind words! Glad your enjoying the channel.
In my experience, there isn't a lot of consistency with square or rectangularly packaged capacitors and their dot codes. It makes things challenging at times. The other big challenge is that the paint used for the dots has shifted hue over the decades, making a brown look an awful lot like orange or red, an so forth. Often times, I have to get a q-tip and clean the dots with alcohol, or even acetone to clear away gunk and often an oxidized layer of the old paint to make the dots readable.
+Jason Atkin
I agree Jason. This is the "most standard" way of reading them. There are a few cheaper types where they didn't even have the dots to put paint in, they just dab a bit of paint on the edges. Alcohol does clean them up nicely.
I learned the resistor color code by the politically incorrect bad boys etc etc rhyme. Mica caps always give me fits but not anymore. Thanks for taking the time to make the video. It's much appreciated
+Michael Lloyd ...BAD BOYS RAPE OUR YOUNG GIRLS BUT VIOLET GIVES WILLINGLY, SHE'S GOOD REALLY...that's the color code:MORIZE IT!
After a short time you'll just look at the colors and see the values intuitively!
+Michael Monahan LOL yep... I don't think they teach it that way anymore but it's all I ever learned.
+Jon Milliren I learned that in HS electronics too. I had forgotten all about it once the colors just auto converted in my mind. Thanks for the laugh.
+Jon Milliren The thing that bothers me the most is that I don't remember her name being Violet but maybe that's another story for another time (or never) :D
When I learned it back in the 80's it was a slightly different version. That's all i'll say about that.
Great video......reading resistors made really easy!
Resistor are measured in Ohms, K Ohms, M Ohms. All resistors are measured in ohms. K Ohms are resistors that have a value of 1 thousand ohms or more. M ohms are resistors with 1 million Ohms or more. The first resistor in this video had a value of 2700 Ohms, because the resistor value is more than 1 thousand ohms, it is written as 2.7K Ohms. Excellent Video, very intuitive.
2.7K is not a good way of writing it, it should be written 2K7, the reason is the decimal place could be misread or missed all together.
Hello Mr. Carlson. I always think of the multiplier as the number of zeros to throw on the end. To keep from getting mixed up when I read the low values I keep in mind that gold is worth more than silver so yellow violet gold is 4.7 ohm and yellow violet silver is .47 ohm. The first time I saw 1% resistors it threw me for a loop that there were four bands instead of three for the resistance. For example brown black red red, 10200 ohm. Great job as always.
This was a great video, and I learned a lot. The only problem is that I am shade color blind so I have a real problem see the colors on the resistors. I have no problem figuring the values as long as you give me the colors; so on my own I will never be able to calculate the values. Thanks again and I really enjoyed the video.
Hey Mr. Carlson, Thankyou, very clear and concise explanation of color code. You took any mystery out determining values. Take care, C.
+Cass Virgillo
Glad this helped Cass!
Hello Paul! I learned via "old school" from a salty, old rascal. Have you ever heard, "Bad boys r...etc...Get some now?" That jingle has stayed in my mind all these years. Thanks for the video!
+Beretta96Dan I still think about poor Violet.
+Beretta96Dan
Yeah, but that's really the hard way; those who learned that mnemonic device without "going to the next level" are always counting on their fingers as they recite the sentence. It's better to just learn the color code without any crutches.
By the way, I learned "GOLD" and "SILVER" as a separate sentence -- "Good Stuff!"
+Chris Silva
Save your pity; she was willing.
Lol! Sounds like you have heard it too!
EdWatts That's true, so that what I hear.
Nice tech tip Paul. I find myself grabbing my spin wheels too often. Thumbs up from me.Now why would someone give a thumbs down for free knowledge.
+The Radio Shop
Thanks for the kind words Buddy!
I have a very old used Mica capacitor(condenser) that is leftover from my late father's box of stuff he had from his days as an apprentice for RCA. It is small deep brown brick - - and following your instructions I read it as 410 picoFarads with a 2% tolerance rating. The paint on the colored dots has worn off so it is hard to read. The Cx on my multimeter indicates ~400 picoFarads. The colored dot pattern looks like Yel Brn Blk Red - - following the directions you described here
You are doing an amazing job. I like how you explain everything on every single video. Like "Ray Hindle" said, liked and subscribed. Thanks!
Thanks, glad you're enjoying!
Never knew there were a 3 band color code. Always great stuff, thanks.
My college instructor had a rhyme for remembering color codes:
(B)ad (B)oys (R)ob (O)ur (Y)oung (G)irls (B)ut (V)iolet (G)ives (W)illingly... I told him another:
(B)ad (B)eer (R)ots (O)ur (Y)oung (G)uts (B)ut (V)odka (G)oes (W)ell.
Black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, grey, white.
Simple.
this is the right reading for resistor color coding to rate the multiplier current
Wow your videos are excellent sir..i would have had much higher marks if you were my teacher in school. Keep up the good work
Having worked electronics all my life 40yrs of career and prior that it was my go-to hobby in school.... I learned the color code a real long time ago but thing is i've always applied it to everything around me so sometimes people will (as example) ask a question what color was that car and i'll just blurt out "5" and then explain i meant green.... I even recently went to buy some general use spray bomb paint and the hardware counter guy asked what color and i without even thinking just came out with "3" ... which left him looking a bit stunned....
+peteb2
LOL! Sounds like your painting a small block.
Thanks for this very helpful lesson. Now I know how to read color codes. I salute you sir! :)
Many thanks for the tech tip, somehow this just made more sense to my brain and I'm glad I watched. Now if I could only find a wad of miscellaneous resistors to separate into marked bins for practice, I'd be set :)
+Redemptus Renatus
Glad you enjoyed! Ham swap meets are a great place to find assorted piles of resistors.
I used to know this back in the late 70s thank you for the refresher course...love all your videos
+craneoperator4
So neat to read all the "memory lane stories!" Thanks for your comment.
Mr Carlson's Lab can you do a video or answer how to find out what the volts are after seeing what the values of the resistors and domino caps?
Many domino style caps don't have that information on them, so if one is faulty, I replace it with a standard 500 Volt 1% modern Mica cap. Or.... I really like NPO-C0G, thats:C Zero G capacitors.
Hey Paul, great video as always! what about a tech tip on identifying a transistor for replacement when the original has no markings or part numbers?
Gosh, your tech tips are phenomenal - I do really mean that. Do you host online classes on Udemy or some other platform, if so I want to purchase your course. I really love electronics, I am still learning and your pace and approach to presenting the material is extraordinary. I know this video is about 7 years old as of this writing and I did take a look at your most recent video titles and well, they appear to be interesting but those most recent videos don't appear to focus on these basics. I am subscribed and the bell is on. I look forward to your videos. Thank you so much!
He has a ton of videos on Patreon. Highly recommend
This method made it so much easier thank you.
New subscriber here. Thanks so much for your videos. I've learned a lot watching them, I think possibly enough to start restoring my old RCA cathedral battery radio.
I recently bought 3 new stereo amplifier boards from China & one of them had a wrong value resistor on one channel from the factory. They are some new type resistor color code with more bands. It was 1/4 watt with colors: Green Brown Black Brown Brown. After researching, = 510x10= 5.1kΩ 1% That took a while to figure out. Thank you for covering those domino caps as well. Take care.
+Farmradio
Glad you enjoyed!
Thanks for your video it helps my channel grow and push me
make more, Good Job
This is really helpful , thank you for posting this and taking the time to record it. I agree it is really simple this way and will for sure help me doing this faster... Mica caps is perhaps the best lesson here.. I never knew how to read them.... Brilliant, thank you Mr Carlson :) - Ron
+Ron C Yeah the Caps one is quite unusual. I suppose this mainly because most of us don't use old Mica Caps every day .:)
Good one !
My rule with Mica caps is never change them because they don't go bad... but now I can make sure of it :)
+Ron C
Glad you enjoyed Ron, and 101blog!
+Ron C
This is a really good question Paul. Have you ever come across any mica cap failures used under normal conditions?
Very few. The ones that stand out were in a Telefunken Panadaptor, and a Johnson Viking Valiant transmitter. There are probably more, but it would have been long ago. So usually they are pretty dependable.
Thanks, that really helped me to understand. Gold & silver multipliers always had me in doubt, Cheers Mr C.
+brickscratch
Glad you enjoyed!
+Mr Carlson's Lab I do appreciate your clear explanations :)
Thanks again Paul, I never knew the resistor code worked across the board. Dare I say... You are the Mutts Nutts:-)
Your videos are great and extremely informative. Thank you
My issue isn't figuring it out from the colors, but those blue mica resistors make it incredibly difficult to actually see WHAT the colors are. Whoever came up with that idea should be fired! (why not a white resistor?)
I just screen shot your color code picture and I cropped it..thanks for the lesson
this made it so clear, I hated working out their values. many MANY thanks
Nicely explained! Nothing really new for me, but I would have appreciated such video when I was learning this stuff :)
+MrJohhhnnnyyy
Thanks for your comment!
Very good lesson Mr. Paul. Thank you a lot. Carlos from Brasil
Thank you for another easy to digest video!
Thanks! Now I'm a bit more experienced I need to probably need read these resistors properly, I can compare them for similarity but I need to know them exact. thanks alot.
I'm so glad i found your channel...well explained!
I'm slightly colourblind,so i always have a magnifying glass with white led built in to see the colour clearly,but once i know th colours i can read em pretty fast, great vdeo nonethless!
+Glychee S
Glad you enjoyed Glychee!
Nice tip Paul, thanks. I've never seen one of those domino styled caps before.
+Robert Calk Jr.
Glad you enjoyed Robert!
This is an older video but I still enjoyed it nonetheless. I understood the concept of the multiplier as being zeroes but silver and gold as the multiplier left me thinking "huh...whodathunkit?"
Great instruction!
Thanks Jared, glad you found this useful!
keep on. we are here to support you
Thank you!
really educative and the best explanation you are so much better than my instructor, can we have a topic on low voltage transistors
Awesome video thank you this is a lot of help I’m just starting with electronics so learning what I can . The basics is were I’m at right now but really enjoying learning ,
Thanks those domino caps always sent me into a spin glad i finally know how to read them. Though i really don't see much of them anymore.
+mac theknife
Your welcome!