10k resistors: Is it just me?

[Ed_Dinning]

Hi Folks, it can be a production engineering purchasing thing where the huge volumes bought reduce the price significantly.
A a major SMPS far east manufacturer the preferred type was a 10K 1% for all positions.
This also speeded up auto insertion as only 1 station was used for all 10K values.

Ed

[IanBland]

I have sometimes made a conscious effort to use something other than 1k, 10k, and 100k for this reason. Nevertheless they are my largest "stock" by a couple of orders of magnitude!

[Graham G3ZVT]

I think it was a lecturer at college that remarked to us half jokingly, "When in doubt use a 2.2k". I still think of triple-red as the "universal " component.

[evingar]

Originally Posted by Steve G4WCS

Years and years ago when I worked in electronics we had a lazy circuit designer who couldn't be bothered working out resistor values or breadboarding to determine the correct fixed values to put in a circuit. Fast forward 20 odd years to where he has been promoted out of harm's way he is still referred to as "Trimpot Trevor".

Reminds me of some boards I had to test when I first started work.

It was a signal conditioning card and consisted of 3 op amps surrounded by a sea of solder turrets. From a set of tables we had to calculate the values of resistors and caps to to give the right gain and frequency response - then fit them. I wondered at the time how much more the design engineer of that board was being paid than I was - I suppose he had to select the type of op-amp (OP27 ISTR)

[Julesomega]

I remember a distributor's rep. telling me a few decades ago that 10k was the most-specified (and therefore ordered) value

[kalee20]

Originally Posted by Ed_Dinning

Hi Folks, it can be a production engineering purchasing thing...a major SMPS far east manufacturer the preferred type was a 10K 1% for all positions.

This also speeded up auto insertion as only 1 station was used for all 10K values.

Absolutely. And sometimes a circuit has to be designed around the equipment which will build it. For an automatic insertion machine which has capacity for say 20 bandoliers, if you end up with 21 different resistor values production cost jumps right up! So it might even be cheaper to design-in three 10kΩ resistors in parallel to eliminate the need for, say, a single 3.3kΩ.

From a design point of view, good practice would be to finish with 18 different values, so that if a design modification is needed requiring a new, unused value, there's still capacity in the production process. As it happens, I've never had to deal with this in the 'day job' though I still aim to common-up on values, where possible, in a circuit. It makes the parts list shorter. Just so happens that 10kΩ is not one of my go-to values!

[ekjdm14]

Not resistors, but I've noticed a tendency towards using up 47uF electrolytic caps from my supply faster than any others.