Seeing is believing .

[HamishBoxer]

Just going to say it is called wire Ken!

PS I have reses go down in value though

[Radio Wrangler]

I particularly like distributor catalogues where zero ohm resistors are assigned the same power rating as the finite resistors of the same body size

David

[Refugee]

Tinned copper wire on a hand built board.

[julie_m]

When I was working in the industry, our auto-placement machines were able to insert links cut from 22SWG tinned copper wire on a reel.

[AC/HL]

Also in SMD: https://www.google.com/search?q=zero...w=1280&bih=869

[TonyDuell]

I believe 'zero ohm' resistors are a relatively recent thing. I have an HP interface module (HP11203, BCD input interface for the 9800 series calculators) from the early 1970s where they used low-value (I think 2.7 ohms for some reason) 'normal' resistors that could be soldered in one of 2 locations to cofigure the thing. There is no electrical reason why a zero ohm resistor could not have been used, so my guess is that they did not exist at the time.

[julie_m]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

I particularly like distributor catalogues where zero ohm resistors are assigned the same power rating as the finite resistors of the same body size

Did they also give a percentage tolerance on them?

[Refugee]

I have seen some zero ohm links that had a resistor body molded onto them without any markings so that they looked like normal resistors in all other respects.
They would have come from one of those "strippers" that were sold off in the 1970s period.

[Argus25]

In this case it does look like the resistor is mis-labelled. It is hard to imagine that the orange band was once black.

But I think in some cases the paint changes color with time and heating and some colors do it more than others. Also, there is ambiguity on some red and orange paints, that can say make a 1k resistor look like a 10k or a 4.7k look like a 47k etc as the pigment in the red paint fades. Or even the other way if the orange gets baked, it might look red.

Recently I bought a batch of 500V rated mil spec dipped mica capacitors, all nos. Much to my astonishment one was a dead short. So it never hurts to check all parts before using them to weed out the duds or the freak cases of the wrong label.

[Refugee]

We once had a reel of SMD parts with an incorrect label on it.
The pick and place went on putting the wrong part in making for lots of overtime fixing all the boards.
Modern mistakes cause a modern problems that are often extensive.
Then there is the task of pointing the finger and compensation.

[Craig Sawyers]

Originally Posted by Argus25

In this case it does look like the resistor is mis-labelled. It is hard to imagine that the orange band was once black.

I worked for a small company in the early 80's, and one of the guys was profoundly colour-blind. We eventually banned him from restocking the resistor drawers - what ended up in each drawer was semi random

[julie_m]

Originally Posted by Refugee

We once had a reel of SMD parts with an incorrect label on it.
The pick and place went on putting the wrong part in making for lots of overtime fixing all the boards.

Our through-hole placement machines could do simple resistance tests (both ways, for the sake of diodes) as they placed each component, and would sound an alarm if an anomaly was detected. I'm surprised a SMD pick-and-place machine didn't have such a facility.

[Refugee]

The components were small capacitors. I have no idea how well trained the operator was.
One guy used to sped hours with his head and shoulders in the machine and the other guy used to use a much older machine that was kept as a spare.

[julie_m]

Ah, fair point if it was capacitors. You're pretty much on your own with SMD capacitors ..... About the only way of estimating the value is by size, and only an experienced person is likely to notice.

We did test everything that left the factory, though, so would have caught such an error before any faulty goods were shipped and only affected the beginning of the production run. The lab would have been called and we'd have spent half a day looking for a non-existent fault in the in-house-built test rig before deciding actually, yes, a whole batch can be made wrong .....

[Refugee]

I was fairly lucky in the fact that there were a couple of dozen boards of each type and some were OK.
They had a university type guy whom spent ages with a network analyser to no avail.
They let me have a look and the first thing I did was to isolate the part of the circuit that differed between board types. These parts were all passive components so that eliminated the use of external power supplies and signal generators.
All it took was a couple of runs with the network alalyser and the boards were off for rework in a couple of hours.

[emeritus]

In the 1970's I remember that we paid a premium to have our supplier thoroughly screen and 100% test all the components that were to be used in our first prototype batch of military-spec boards. They evidently were less than thorough as the zener diodes that were vital to correct operation turned out to have been incorrectly labelled. Unfortunately the boards were encapsulated assemblies, so finding the cause of the problem was less than straightforward. Testing had been planned to only be carried out after encapsulation because the design of a tuned circuit which included a printed circuit inductor took into account the dielectric constant of the encapsulant.

[Refugee]

That might have been a candidate for a pre-encapsulation test procedure.
It could have saved a lot of time and cost.

[dglcomp]

Zero ohm just has a single black stripe, makes for very nice looking wire links as well as being easier for an auto insertion machine to use.