Elenco365 Piece Resistor Kit - RK-365

I quite like this little kit. I bought it years ago and it’s supplied all the resistors I’ve ever needed except for specialty high-wattage ones. You only get five of each resistance. It might have been nice if they had put higher quantities of more commonly used ones. But I like that these are half-watt. In a lot of small electronics projects you can get away with quarter-watt resistors, but these are beefier and so give you a little more versatility (and room for error). I stuck two little pieces of cardboard in my box to act as dividers, as you can see in the picture. I also like to store a resistor color codes cheat sheet card in the box. It might have been nice if the kit came with those items, but you can easily print your own reference card from the internet. And the bags are labeled with actual numbers, so you arguably never need to read color codes, but you do need to somehow distinguish between the four different ratings in each little bag. (Nonetheless, that’s a lot easier than ringing through a completely unsorted bin of 365 pieces!)You will want to have a breadboard if you’re working on little electronics projects. And you’ll probably want a soldering iron and some protoboards too. And you should really have a multimeter on hand so you can tell what’s happening. If you’re just doing little low-voltage battery-powered circuits then you don’t need anything fancy and you might take a look at the Aneng AN8008 but please don’t use a cheap meter on high-energy circuits like your household wiring.

My set (purchased October 2011) doesn't look like the one pictured. The cardboard box is flimsy. When the outer sleeve is removed, there is a label that describes each of the 18 numbered plastic bags (4 values in each bag). Inside each larger bag is 4 smaller plastic bags, each labeled with the values of the resistors inside.The main label is in three sections (6 bags in each section), In other words bags number 1-6, 7-12, and 13-18 are described with the contents in each bag. It's easy to find the resistor you want by identifying the large bag first, and then the smaller bag inside the large bag.To make this more convenient, I organized the 18 bags, and using 3 binder clips, I clipped the 6 bags of each set together in order, to make it easier to find resistors in the future. while it's not hard to find one bag out of 18, keeping them in order makes it trivial to organize the resistors.It's not great, but the cost is low, so it's hard to complain.

This is a nice little kit to get started. I like the variety of resistors, but there are only 5 of each value regardless of their general popularity in electronics projects. They could have included fewer of the less popular (maybe 2 or 3) and more of the more popular (maybe 10 or 15) values.I just breadboarded a project and needed more than 5 10k ohm resistors. Since I'm just getting back into electronics projects I was up a creek. It's easy enough to order individual resistors in bulk from someone like Mouser, but this should get you started.One thing I liked is that each set of resistors comes bagged with a number and there is a key on the box so you know which bag the resistor you're looking for is in. It saves time trying to read the color code of a bunch of random bags to figure out which value is which.

We are using this 365 piece resistor set to augment the parts that came with the "Elenco 300-in-One Elecronic Project Lab". This set has a great selection of resistors and come packaged in labeled baggies for easy location of the needed value. Each resistor is also marked using the standard "BBROYGBVGW" color code and the few I have tested with an ohm meter are easily within tolerance.Overall I am very happy with this set of resistors.Highly Recommended!CFH

It only has 5 of each resistor, but the selection makes it great for hobbyist. The picture implies that there are separators in a box to keep them organized. Mine were not in a box like that and just has a bunch of little bags. Would have preferred it to have a better system to organize with, but still a great kit.