Don't know where to post this so i plonked it here.
Another stalwart of silicon valley is closing. After ACE components, Weirdstuff warehouse , HSC ( Halted) now excess solutions (which acquired lots of stock from HSC and ACE when they packed it in) is also folding at the end of this month (June)
I was there last saturday and they were removing all the ins from the wall. all the Ic's and transistors are gone except for the stuff that is down in the large racks and categorized under 'miscellaneous'. you have to take your time and dig ... i found a bunch of LM399's
They still have plenty of resistors, caps, connectors and all the other stuff.
They are on 7th street close to the fairgrounds and UPS (they moved .. again.. milpitas to SJ , then HSC moved , HSC moved again , HSC got eaten by Excess , Excess moved... all the moves probably cost them more than the whole inventory was worth...)
hurry.. only 11 days left. and then the last man standing will be Anchor electronics but their range is very limited.
some old cruft, mainly with defects , still overpriced... that was always the problem at halted. they always thought their test equipment was made from solid gold.
old multimeters with 31/2 led displays ( very old Hp, the one with their own nanoprocessor in it) , some keithley 175 , old tek analog scopes (22xx or 24xx series , not familiar with tek model numbers) some power supplies with analog meters.
Main interest would be their surface mount parts. 1$ for a reel of resistors... i grabbed a bunch of through hole ic's , transistors and diodes mainly as spares for test equipment i have. things like 7805 7808 7812 and the negative variants. i grabbed national semi parts. vintage 1990's. some transistor sin metal can like 2n2907 2n3904 . 1n914 and a bunch of the 1n zeners. some power diodes that are now obsolete but in use in the HP E36xx and E361x series. stuff for my fluke and keithley meters.
i basically grabbed the service manuals for any equipment i have that uses thru-hole, made a list of all diode's transistors and ic's and spent a good two hours digging .. got about half of it. spent 45$ and have enough spares to repair tenfold of the number of machines i have. it'll last the rest of my life if i should fry one (which is doubtful.. they are nearly indestructible apart from when they develop capacitor problems. i snatched a bunch of the nichicon and rubycon capacitors for those supplies as well.
it's getting harder and harder to find some of the parts. and whatever little is out there pulls exorbitant prices... 12$ ebay for a transistor that originally was like 2$ ... and they are used on top of that !
anyway , i got the important bits. i'm confident enough a 7805 will still be around in to220 20 years from now. that irf044 fet in to2 ? not so much... and there's no substitute. same for some of the special darlingtons with built in bias resistors. no replacement possible
[..]
I was there last saturday and they were removing all the ins from the wall. all the Ic's and transistors are gone
Any idea whereto? I meant to come back with a catalogue of sorts, since they (somewhat understandably) couldn't be bothered to list them on-line and I can memorize only so many part numbers. There where some neat ones among those. iirc they had even LT1028 and some OpAmps in metal cans.
... all the moves probably cost them more than the whole inventory was worth...)
just to throw oil on the fire: I was told the last move was due to Amazon purchasing the estate to build a warehouse ...
some old cruft, mainly with defects , still overpriced... that was always the problem at halted. they always thought their test equipment was made from solid gold.
old multimeters with 31/2 led displays ( very old Hp, the one with their own nanoprocessor in it) , some keithley 175 , old tek analog scopes (22xx or 24xx series , not familiar with tek model numbers) some power supplies with analog meters.
That mirrors my experience with the one surplus place I know of around here, overpriced test equipment that just sits on the shelves forever. When it's cheaper to buy on ebay you know it's overpriced. I sometimes think these businesses tend to be an excuse for hoarding rather than anything else. They don't really want to part with the stuff, but if it's "for sale" in the store they can tell themselves that they're not hoarding.
scionsofsilicon@gmail.com send them an email to be on their distrbution list. right now they don't have a website. but they were the ones hauling away all the blue cabinets with the drawers. they did not take anything from the shelves. they were purely after the semiconductors.
i'm still trying to find out who grabbed ACE stock when the owner died. Excess got about 1/3 of it , mainly the loose parts (bulk or on the shelves.) i do not know who grabbed all the reels... i heard conflicting information. some guy out if gilroy / morgan hill , outback , or some store in florida (Boca semi) but no hard confirmation.
a lot of hoarding from the owners went on at hsc (i suspect). one of them was very attached to old vacuum tube radios and always talking military this and military that. but did not know the difference between a tl272 or tl27l2. when they showed up at de anza swap meet there were invariably old radios and old black and white tv's at crazy prices. some french brand futuristic old tv with the tube mounted on a swivel was like 500$... not working condition.
still, sad to see them go. they were convenient.
Sorry to just read today they are gone.
I was planning a trip to San Jose tomorrow and I like to pop in there when I'm in town. The last time I did this about a year ago I found a nice stash of small touch screen LCDs and bought them all! (like a 1000 of them)
What happened to all the stuff? They should have had an announcement to all past customers. I know they had my email.
You can still drop in to Anchor Electronics on Walsh Ave. The last shop standing. Very neatly organized, thanks to the ladies running the show. Some test equipment finds present themself time to time.
depressing news. one of the reasons I love[d] living in the bay area was the great selection of used tronics parts.
now, all of them are gone. its only mailorder (mostly new parts, which I dont really WANT, tbh) now. one of the big reasons to stay local to this area was the shopping and now its essentially gone.
I wanted to get some plastic cut and drove over to where TAP plastics used to be in mtn view. now gone, too.
service economy has gone to hell. it may never actually recover. what a world we have here, sigh.
There is still a lot of electronics surplus, but most of it is in China now because that's where most of the manufacturing is.
the point was to avoid china electronics when you are building something you want to count on working.
maybe not spending mouser/digikey kind of money on parts, but you also want at least ONE good use out of the part. when buying from china, its always a gamble and even simple things like wire or resistors, they can mess up. I dont like taking chances. buying the old used (maybe even old enough to have been made in the US) stuff, while it was dirty and needed physical clean-up, it was made when you don't cheap-out on every single thing and at every single step. those old parts, other than dried up electrolytics, would be top-grade or better, by today's standards. they are just old and maybe even tarnished (solder leads, etc).
I didn't mind some clean-up. I liked knowing I was getting wire that I could trust, and not some CCA junk that has unknown origin.
silicon valley does not seem to have any surplus stores left. not of parts that were here for years, and are still worth using. that's what I mean by surplus. foreign surplus has no interest since it might be even lower quality or re-used parts. that's going the wrong direction
I get wanting to avoid China, but that's where everything is made now so that's where the surplus is. You have to be building equipment in order to end up with surplus parts and there is very little of that going on in the USA and other Western nations anymore.
One more shout out to the ladies at Anchor. First time there and they were all very kind.Prices for components are very reasonable.
Hi, does anyone know if there are any remaining surplus electronics stores for SMD parts and like remaining in Bay/SanJose area?