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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
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!
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 !!!
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!"
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 ;)
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.
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
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 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 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 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 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
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 👍🏽
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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 ,
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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'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!
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.
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....
