White ink , fine tip, felt-tip pen ?

I used to use a large sewing needle and one of those tiny bottles of model paint. i could write, if I took the time, or just color code the parts. I had a couple dozen bottles I bought for 10 cents each, in red and silver. Everything else was gone by the time I got there. :)

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net:

Fingernail polish comes with built in brush. Lots of different colors available now days.

The brush is too wide to write on ICs with.

Try electrical suppliers. They used to have a type with white paint/ink and a roller ball tip.

They exist. I even have white artists pencils. Check art supply stores - not office supply stores. IIRC you are looking for something used to retouch blue prints.

Rick

In the states I go to Michaels. An Art and Craft store. At least a dozen colors and that many types.

Bob AZ

I've had absolutely horrible results with the white roller-ball markers. I always got a wide smear of paint with a ball track down the center. But you can find silver felt markers that are much easier to use and don't dry up and quit working after the first time you use 'em.

and

What is it used for by electricians ? so I don't seem too much of a numb-skull when I enquire

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

with

and

Would the silver ones be in arts and crafts? The last time I was in a large hobbycraft shop I did not find anything suitable in the way of fine felt pens. I assumed somewhere there was something better than my usual toothpick dipped in typing correction fluid

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net:

Depends on how you trim it. And it IS fine for color coding. :)

By the way. Those colors are handy for marking 'look alike' parts when you are building a kit. That way, you do not need to unsolder the capacitors to find where you swapped a .01 and a .001. :)

They exist indeed. I have different colors like > white,gold,silver,whiteblue etc. The pen has an liquid-ink inside and are supplied through a very thin tube (aprox. 0.3mm) with a thin rod sticking out about 0.5mm at the tip which lift the valve inside. They write very clean/nice and permanent. I bought them in Germany on my holiday.

"N Cook" skrev i melding news:f3a7p8$3s1$ snipped-for-privacy@inews.gazeta.pl...

That was what I used red model paint for. I repaired Commodore 64 computers to the component level when they first came out. I built a test bed with ZIF sockets to test suspect ICs. Good chips got a dot of paint by pin one. Some of the parts already had yellow or green dots, so I used the red paint I already had. A guy in the Orlando Commodore computer club asked me for an estimate to repair his computer.

It was about fifty dollars. He was yelling that I was trying to rip him off, and to bring it to him at the next meeting, even though everyone else charged $75 or more to even look at one, and usually exchanged the board with a factory rebuild. He went though his rants again, then left.

The next week he was back, screaming, "I replaced all the chips you marked bad, and it still doesn't work! You don't know what the hell you're doing!" I smiled, and about half the other members did, as well. I told him that I marked GOOD parts, not the bad ones. He started swearing and screaming that I had to use green paint to mark good parts. I told him I preferred red, and it was obvious that he was a thief, and had never intended to let me repair it in the first place. He never came back. :-)

I've never had that problem, in 45+ years of building electronics. When building a kit, I always sorted the parts as I unpacked them, to make sure everything was there.

We used similar pens for drafting back in the days before computers. Of course we only used black ink.

We used to use them to label switchboards when they were made out of composite material (like industrial Arborite).

You could try one of those White-Out pens that they sell at office supply stores. I don't know if the point would be sharp enough though.

- Mike

Art supply stores. The kind that college art students, professional artists and architects get supplies at. Not the current spate of chain hobby stores "specializing" in silk floral arrangements and paint your own t-shirt junk.

Rick

cased

They are probably not permanent on hard plastic. It would have to be permanent like th eStaedler Lumocolour or Stanger makes, both German

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

"Michael A. Terrell" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net:

:)

Of course one should do that. However, when building a complex kit with lots of 'look alike parts', even the most careful person may work a couple of minutes past 'too tired', and grab the wrong part for a particular location. Later, one notices that one is 'short' a particular value part and realizes that one must have already used it in a wrong place. Fun to try to find without color coding.

Color coding the parts once they are sorted gives one a) the chance to double check the sorting. b) a way, later, to double check the placement against the layout diagram. c) comes in handy when, for example, your Elecraft K2 transciever shows a strange spurious response on a particular band because you interchanged two bypass capacitors.

Most are. In my experience, the really fine point Sharpies use an ink you can rub off with your fingers.