Playing The Lottery - The Electronic Goldmine Surprise Bocks

[cometazzi]

Electronic Goldmine has a sale on their 4" x 4" x 4" 'Surprise Box of Electronics Parts'.

Not gonna lie, I love me some electronics parts lot surprises so I took the bait. I do play around with non-audio circuits as well as effects pedals and amplifiers, so it's all for fun, right?

Welp, yesterday it showed up, today I opened it:



Just over 2lbs of b.s. (the board was compensated for).
It was filled to the rim with Brim:


I did a quick sort by type, and not so much by value. Here's the first look:

Annotations:

1) 4A/250V 5mH chokes
2) TFMOV15S391 Thermal Fuse and Metal Oxide Varistors
3) 15A blade fuses
4) 9 misc knobs!
5) Electrolytic capacitors, mostly 25V 220uF
6) Poly Film 7500pf 63V caps
7) Pile o' diodes, some look like Germanium, some look Zener, most are 1N400x series rectifiers
8) Misc capacitors, maybe mylar, maybe tantalum or other type
9) Fasteners - mostly wood screws
10) 2-pole connectors of some sort. Pretty useless, lots of them.
11) V10271U - Panasonic Radial Varistors. A whole dang lot of them.
12) Pile of LEDs. Most are pale green in color, a few red, a few clear
13) one misc LCD display
14) Pile of switches, mostly momentary PCB mount pushbutton, some are micro toggles
15) Pile of 1/4W resistors, a few 1W and a single resistor network. Nothing special for sure.
16) Misc tantalum caps, mostly marked "56K"
17) Liquid Refreshment (not from the box)
18) Teeny speakers and piezos, voltage unknown but looks like laptop stuff, so probably either 5V or 12V
19) RCA connectors, PCB mount. More than I need.
20) Headers and Connectors
21) Crapload of PCB mount trimmers, mostly 5K of unknown taper (probably linear)
22) Fuses with leads and caps. Most look like maybe 220V and 10A. Will have to look closer, as the caps cover most of the markings.
23) Whole lotta ceramic caps in visually-homogenous piles, but not sorted by value yet
24) Looks like mostly relays
25) Semiconductors! Three 2n4401, one 7400-series logic chip, a TO-3 canned LM317, two SK3120C DC-DC convertors of some sort
26) Pile of capacitors, that look like Silver Mica types. Mostly 390pf, which is a weird value, but maybe still good for weird tonestacks.
27) Another pile of LEDs that look suspect. Might be IR or UV types.
28) Some wired connector and four diode modules that look a lot like the Blu-Ray laser module that I replaced in my Sony Playstation forever ago. Basically garbage.
29) (lower left corner) Buttload of crystal oscillators, various frequencies. Not sure what I'll do with them.
30) (lower left corner) possibly some sort of thermal protector. Marked "PEPI N 371 +065F"
(unmarked) Below #10 there are 5 SPST mini toggle switches that I didn't annotate

So that's what's in the $5 Electronics Goldmine Surprise Bocks. Are there $5-worth of parts here? Probably.

Would I recommend it? Probably not.

I would have been happier with fewer of each type and more types, but this is the luck of the draw. Wait a while, order another box, and it's a different mix. (Though I likely won't). There are a few things that I can use here, and there are some things I probably won't have much of a use for. While I hoped for more semiconductors, there really weren't that many aside from diodes. To some extent that's probably good, given that I likely wouldn't trust them. At least diodes and passives are easy to test out.

I played the lottery. "If you're not losing, you're winning" as a local friend who does the Bingo Bus Tour says.

Overall, I'm glad I didn't end up with a bunch of Hg Ampules, ancient caps with Polychlorinated Biphenyls, piles of Pb dust, or bits of Cd to dispose of.

 

[ahiddentableau]

I consider this post a fine public service. I've looked at that book on their site more than once and always wondered what it would be like, so thank you for sating my curiousity.

 

[Timbresmith1]

I consider this post a fine public service. I've looked at that book on their site more than once and always wondered what it would be like, so thank you for sating my curiousity.

Have found the occasional gem on that site. Friday deals are sometimes great. Need to look regularly tho. The good stuff can go really fast. How do I know? I’ve bought qty 50 of a couple things. They were all gone the next day

 

[Engine Swap]

“Estate Sale in a Box”

 

[cometazzi]

I consider this post a fine public service. I've looked at that book on their site more than once and always wondered what it would be like, so thank you for sating my curiousity.

No problem! I don't want to set a bad tone with just one datapoint, but I while I didn't really lose on this one, it doesn't feel like much of a 'win' either. As I stated, I thoroughly feel I got my $5 worth between the LEDs, caps, knobs (D-shaft, tho) and switches. Easily $5 worth of suspense and entertainment for a Tuesday Night.

Lot of stuff here I can't see myself ever using, and some of it's so esoteric I'm not sure anyone in my very small circle of tinkerers would find a use for it either. (I have asked, no takers), Obviously I'll give any of this stuff to anyone that can use it. I've thought about participating in Tgimboej just to throw some stuff in. I might put a few lots up on ebay at next to free to see if I can move some of it along to someone who wants it, but there's really not much of value here. I happen to work for a company that recycles electronics so I can just dump the stuff I don't want there, but I'd feel better handing it off to someone that could do something with it.

Not to despair though! Maybe I'll try it again in a year and get a totally different mix of crap! I have a feeling that if I ordered another box any time soon it'd be the same stuff, but if time passes, it'll be different.

Also to note, I initially sprung for an assortment of Futurlec Value Packs prior to the Surprise Box, but the Box arrived first (that part wasn't a surprise). I had originally ordered Futurlec Value Packs to create my intial stock of parts about 20 years ago (almost on the dot) and was interested in a comparison. I was going to do a post on that, but since this one didn't seem to gain much response I figured "naw".

Have found the occasional gem on that site. Friday deals are sometimes great. Need to look regularly tho. The good stuff can go really fast. How do I know? I’ve bought qty 50 of a couple things. They were all gone the next day

I did happen to order the Suprise Box on a Friday, and I nabbed a few Friday Deals to go along with it (that I didn't photograph). Namely , a pack of 80 assorted LEDs for $2.49, a pile of 50 assorted diodes (mostly zener) for $2.49, and half a dozen blue/green bicolor LEDs for $1. There was a deal with something like 50 house-numbered transistors for a couple of bucks that I wish I would have bit on, but I did not.

“Estate Sale in a Box”

That's pretty much it, yes.

 

[ahiddentableau]

Also to note, I initially sprung for an assortment of Futurlec Value Packs prior to the Surprise Box, but the Box arrived first (that part wasn't a surprise). I had originally ordered Futurlec Value Packs to create my intial stock of parts about 20 years ago (almost on the dot) and was interested in a comparison. I was going to do a post on that, but since this one didn't seem to gain much response I figured "naw".

It's funny. That's exactly how I started out, too, back in the pre-Tayda era. Futurlec! I still have a bunch of the ICs. They shipped them in little pieces of tube that somebody'd cut then they sealed the ends with packing tape. Took forever to get them sorted and labelled, but everything I've used from that batch has worked.

 

[cometazzi]

It's funny. That's exactly how I started out, too, back in the pre-Tayda era. Futurlec! I still have a bunch of the ICs. They shipped them in little pieces of tube that somebody'd cut then they sealed the ends with packing tape. Took forever to get them sorted and labelled, but everything I've used from that batch has worked.

Yep, same here. No issues with anything I got. They still send chips in little sections of tubes, and now they roll up a printed label in the bag of stuff. Not like the olden days, where you'd get a bag that someone wrote something on with a bluntie. That is, used to be a Sharpie but has seen some use. However, according to my records, the value packs have gone up a whole nickel each in 20 years!

Oh, and it still takes 2 months to get your stuff. Maybe the U.S. isn't their main market, but I think they'd have picked up on Tayda's model if they cared. Tayda doesn't have everything, but they seem to be doing everything else right.

 

[guitar_paul1]

This is great! When I started learning electronics many years ago, I'd buy grab bags from Radar Electronics and Western Surplus in Seattle. Then I'd try to figure out what each part did. I've still got a few hundred (mostly low gain) Ge transistors stashed somewhere.