Close value population removed from R or C lot

[Conrad Hoffman]

This is an obvious trick, unless you haven't thought of it, which took me longer than I care to admit. I had a batch of extremely good capacitors, near zero TC, but all the close tolerance parts had been removed, leaving only parts quite high and quite low from the nominal value. A double humped distribution. Then it hit me. Put a selected high and low in series to get an exact half value. Do it again. Now put the pairs in parallel to get back to the original desired value. Sure, you use 4 parts, but for standards and such it works well. For resistors, parallel a high and low, then put the pairs in series. A bag of useless becomes a bag of useful.

[enut11]

Thanks Conrad. A very handy tip on how to make use of lower tolerance quality components.
enut11