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Where To Get Sets and Parts For discussions about swapmeets, rallies, NVCF and BVWS, car boot sales, antique and charity shops, dealers, newspaper adverts, the local tip and just about any other source of equipment (other than eBay).

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Old 6th Jun 2020, 12:30 pm   #661
BRASSBITS
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Default Re: Maplin stores

I never understood the gift voucher thing, my gift vouchers have a picture of the queen on them and are redeemable anywhere.
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Old 6th Jun 2020, 1:45 pm   #662
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Default Re: Maplin stores

Some people consider it vulgar to give cash as a gift. It's also not a good idea to send cash in the post.
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Old 6th Jun 2020, 2:02 pm   #663
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Default Re: Maplin stores

If a gift voucher goes AWOL in the normal post the GPO won't pay out compensation in they same way they wouldn't if a bank note did.
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Old 6th Jun 2020, 2:15 pm   #664
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Default Re: Maplin stores

I know from experience that bank notes go missing in the post. Apparently it's quite easy to detect them in an envelope. As a previous poster said, you can use them anywhere.

Gift cards don't have the same attraction.
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 8:46 am   #665
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Default Are you missing Maplins?

I believe today is the second anniversary of final demise of Maplins, I was wondering if people missed them, how they are managing now and who they now use as suppliers. Whilst in my view they were in decline for many years losing their appeal to the hobbyist, I still popped in for the odd component. For at least the last 30 years I have had a Maplins within 2 miles of my home and constructed many projects from kits and designs of theirs. I am now mainly using RS and Farnells supplemented by Ebay, but Maplins were useful being able to buy in small quantities whereas I find with the like of RS that transistor you want is only available in 50s so I’m building up stocks more than I want!

How are others managing?
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:18 am   #666
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

I never really used Maplins except in an emergency, I begrudged paying stupid prices for stuff, for example, 1 red plastic phono plug, Maplin price 99P, CPC price, 10 for 99P.
A small pack of resistors would cost about a pound, yet at CPC I could get a pack of 100 for a pound. I would rather have stock lying about spare than pay over the odds for something, there's a pretty good chance that if I need lets say 1 phono plug today, I will need more in the future.
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:21 am   #667
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

I have got used to the absence of Maplin. I think one of their problems was having too many stores. I am close to Liverpool and they had a store in a prime city centre location and two more in the outer suburbs.

I now use mostly Cricklewood and CPC ( Preston ). There are also a good number of small companies for hardware like BA nuts/bolts
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:25 am   #668
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

I found Maplin useful to get hardware such as boxes and connectors, DIN phono etc. They weren't cheap but local and quick. I never bothered trying to get components from them, I once asked for 6 x 0.1uF caps only to be told that they only keep 2 in stock at any one time. The same for resistors.
I now use the internet for components be it eBay, amazon or one of the major suppliers.
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:30 am   #669
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

Yes, very handy for my hobbies, interests and needs when I just needed to jump in the car and buy it 'today'.
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:32 am   #670
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

Not really. Its forced me to order online and pay much cheaper prices, exercise a bit of patience, and plan better.

Even when I did use Maplin i'd wait at the parts counter for several minutes, sometimes I would have to go and find the staff to help... And sometimes a part the web site claimed they had wasn't in stock. Might sound harsh but - Good riddance!
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:35 am   #671
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

Maplins were handy when I was working in central London as they had a shop just a hundred yards away in Tottenham Court Road which was good if you needed something quickly and didn`t want to wait for RS the next day - other than that I`ve never used them.
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:36 am   #672
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

I miss the Maplin of 40-odd years ago, but not what they had latterly turned into and their demise barely figured in my thoughts. I'd long replaced them with the likes of Farnell, then eBay added to the sourcing diversity- caveat emptor for sure, but there are plenty of willing little vendors there with the NOS, wire-ended, HV, whatever stuff that the big operators are featuring less of. OK, Maplins meant that you could have it today- but I've also ordered stuff from Farnell late in the afternoon and had a Bruges-stock package turn up next morning.
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:37 am   #673
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

I used Maplins only occasionally, the thing which annoyed me most was the lack of product knowledge by the staff. The last thing I bought before they closed was a dongle to convert a VCR output into something my computer could recognise. They had one at about £30 and another at over £100. The assistant couldn't explain what the expensive one offered over the cheaper one, other than 'it must be better'! Needless to say I bought the cheap one.

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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:39 am   #674
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

The local store was just up the road from my work and I often used the "click and collect" feature, and got to know some of the staff quite well.

The problem with the company was that is was loaded with debt by it's owners and had a particularly rubbish website - the "search" was hopeless.

Much missed.
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 9:44 am   #675
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

I have never been able to understand electronics, as a qualified electrician some people find this hard to understand, probably because they don't understand the difference between electrics and electronics. we used to say that an electrician works with relatively low voltages but high currents whereas in electronics you work with higher voltages but lower currents.
I had a friend at school who was brilliant at electronics, he tried to teach me but failed miserably, I think part of my problem was a lack of freely available clear information, yes there were books about, but most of them didn't explain stuff properly, yes they would tell you how to connect say for example a 555 chip, but very often they didn't tell you what pin 1 did, or what happened if you connected say a 1K resistor to it rather than the specified 1.5K. What probably didn't help me either was that I tended to try and run before I could walk! Why build a circuit to flash 2 lights alternatively when you could build a computer?
Anyway recently while being off work I ordered nearly a hundred quids worth of stuff of cpc, transistors, resistors, capacitors, all sorts I even bought a breadboard as well and some veroboard, I was going to give it another go. I downloaded some simple drawings and set to work, the other night I was really pleased with myself, I built a simple circuit, it just flashes two LED's alternately, nothing special, but it works, and I built it. I also have a better understanding now of how components work and what happens if you start altering the values. I am now looking at my next project, this one is going to involve transistors!
I didn't imagine that at 55 years of age I would get excited over a few small bits of metal and plastic. lol
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 10:03 am   #676
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

Well I don't know about missing Maplin as a whole but I do miss being able to pop into my local store when I need the odd component. The staff were always very friendly and tried to be helpful but there was only one of them who had any idea about individual components. I was shocked a few years ago when I bought a ferrite rod aerial and a germanium diode but couldn't buy a variable capacitor of any kind and none of the staff actually knew what one was! I bought a load of stuff when they were closing down but I'll probably end up disposing of most of it on this forum. (Two baskets of anything for a fiver on the last day!) They were expensive for a lot of things but a lot of ordinary folk found them useful and if the successive owners hadn't loaded the company with the cost of buying it they would still be operating. As it was despite making a profit the company wasn't able to make a big enough profit to service the interest payments on the debt. A bit like when Manchester United was bought by the Americans but Maplin wasn't Manchester United!
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 10:27 am   #677
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

Yes I miss Maplins, mainly for the ability to actually see the size of items you were likely to buy. There was a branch close to my work location which was useful. I do agree that it was a bit pricey. There were a few good electronic junk shops in Belfast when I was growing up and I spent many happy Saturdays in them but they went down the chute mainly due to retirement. Now I use ebay and CPC but it was nice to be able to see the actual item in your hand before you made up your mind as to whether or not to buy.
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 10:47 am   #678
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

I used their shops in Stockport and Marple a few times over the years. When I first started using them in the mid 1990s it seemed just right, with a limited number of smallish shops and a catalogue, with the option to mail order.

It's a shame their later owners invested too much in bricks & mortar shops instead of developing an efficient online service that could also offer a click & collect to their existing shops.

I remember the Stockport outlet moved from a smallish shop to a big unit in an edge of town development.

The Huddersfield shop was the size of a small supermarket, or "nerd heaven" as my then girlfriend called it when we had a look round!

I've still got a 2004 catalogue that shows they still had a decent mix of components and "out the box" products.
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 11:13 am   #679
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

I agree with post#8 - it turned into something else many years ago. I remember as a teenager, before they diversified into shops, ordering things from Southend and being so excitied when the big parcel arrived. I could only dream of making their audio mixer, but did use some of their parts such as peak LED meters and headphone amplifiers to customise my homebrew attempts. In my house in the Eighties I built and installed a complicated Maplin control panel to turn lights and various things on and off at preset times. I wonder if the small relay boxes are still there or whether a puzzled electrician wondered what on earth they were?
Like others have mentioned, I visited their shop occasionally if I needed a part straight away for a local job. I regarded it as you would the corner shop - expensive but convenient, though avoiding all the remote control helicopters and computer dongles to find an RF connector could be tedious!
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Old 25th Jun 2020, 11:21 am   #680
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Default Re: Are you missing Maplins?

Just yesterday I was thinking 'Oh how I miss Maplin'. I needed to make up some cables for an ancient EPROM programmer (RS232, video and cassette). Maplin would have sold all the connectors and more importantly they sold cable by the metre. Fortunately I had some offcuts of the right cables in the junk box (probably from Maplin originally) but what I do next time I need some I don't know. I can't afford or store reels of every cable I sometimes use.

There were 4 Maplin shops that I could get to easily by bus from here. Normally going round several of them got me all I needed.

But I agree that Maplin were much more interesting for us about 30 years ago. Alas back then I couldn't afford all the kits I would have liked (I did build just about every one of their ISA cards, some of the home computer add-ons, the Nicam TV tuner/decoder and some others, but I wish I could have afforded/justified the Maplin modem (an interesting bit of history IMHO), the telephone exchange, the weather satellite receiver/decoder/display, etc, etc, etc).
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