Component reels shouldn’t be overpriced or difficult to come by. Dirty Reels connects you to cheap Chinese component suppliers in the Huaqiangbei electronics market. Add a reel of resistors to your next DEV shop order for under $4!
A dirty reel of 5000 100ohm 5% 0603 resistors from a major Chinese manufacturer like Super Ohm is only $3.97. Mouser.com’s cheapest reel comes in at $20 per reel! As per the comments the 5% Mouser price is true, but not the whole picture. 1% reels at Mouser are about $10, and a 5% reel is around $6.50 at Digikey. Prices have dropped a lot since we were buying our parts from the big suppliers, apologies for being a lazy blogger.
Try some searches:
100R Resistor
10K Resistor
100nF Capacitor
1uF Capacitor
Over the past year we created a database of parts and suppliers in Huaqiangbei, the world’s largest electronics market. Dirty Reels is a public search of those parts. Choose the number of reels to purchase and add it to your cart. Behind the scenes we’ll go grab your parts and put them in your order.
Dirty Reels is highly experimental. Currently only resistors and capacitors are included in search results. Once things are running smoothly more components will be listed. The search is also very stupid, your values and units must match the database format: e.g. 100nF, not 0.1uF.
There are (not so) hidden ulterior motives behind Dirty Reels. We’re not trying to become Digikey, and it isn’t profitable to sell reels at this price. Instead, we’re trying to bootstrap a relationship with component suppliers.
For services like Dirty PCBs, Dirt SLA, and Dirty Cables we need a suppliers full price list and pricing formulas, but nobody wants to share that info as most prices are negotiated each time. What we like to do is send a flood of orders to get them interested, then have a meeting and ask for the info we need. Most suppliers are more than cooperative after the initial wave of sales.
You get reels of components near actual Chinese prices, while helping us to seduce new suppliers. Win, win, win!
This is amazing! i get a white page for now when trying to order. keep me updated when it works again.
What part did you try? We’ve been using it ok so far.
won’t matter which component. checkout is just a blank page.
any 2 reels that is. works with 1.
Thanks! Sorry about the bug, I figured it out and updated the site. There was a rounding error in some combination of reel pricing so paypal rejected the order when we passed the details and our site just kinda died before it would normally forward you to paypal for off-site payment.
Any plans for other then resistors and capacitor reels? like sot23-5 lowdrop voltage regulators?
We have a database of 132K parts and prices covering just about everything. A lot of it is garbage, a big chunk is scrapped from our suppliers’ online listing, and some is from trusted suppliers. For now I just want to see the system work. I just limited the search results to Rs and Cs in the SQL query, that’s easy enough to remove later :)
What about through hole components as well?
I’m finding I’m buying resistors in 1000-piece boxes of more and more these days. That and 100nF decoupling caps.
Yes. There’s PTH stuff in the database too, but the current results are super limited while we test it.
Great initiative. What’s the brand for the capacitors? Can it be Samsung or brands alike? Thanks in advance
Samsung quite frequently, yes. It really depends, but it is always a major manufacturer.
Not sure why Mouser pricing appears so high.
$8.36 for 5000 at Digikey, no international shipping to US necessary.
Thats a much better deal than mouser!
Don’t look for 5% resistors on Mouser. A 5000 pcs. reel with 100 Ohm 1% 0603 is just $10 on Mouser (http://www2.mouser.com/search/ProductDetail.aspx?R=0virtualkey0virtualkeyRC0603FR-07100RL)
Still not close to $3.97, but much better than the $20 offer mentioned in the blog post. Not regarding shipping costs (which depend on the country one is ordering from anyway), i would rather take 1% resistors for $10 than 5% resistors for $8.36…
Oops, correction to my comment above. I falsely assumed the $8.36 offer on Digi-Key were for 5% resistors. Sorry, my mistake.
$8.35 is is for a 5000 pcs. reel of 1% resistors. A 5000 pcs. reel with 5% resistos costs only $6.45 on Digi-Key…
Yikes, good point. I’ll update the post. I just looked at the example search and tried to compare to Mouser. I haven’t used digikey for years and had no idea the prices on reels had dropped so much. Thanks for the correction.
Post updated with note. I hope its a useful resource even if it isn’t as drastically cheap as I thought. $3.97 for 5% is the cheapest I’ve seen outside China, and for only $1 more you can get a reel of 1%.
I’m not sure we could get any cheaper without buying container loads. The prices in the database are literally converted to USD, add 4% for paypal fees, 2% currency exchange fees, and a bit to pay the guy who picks them up in the market.
Sub 1R resistors are not available?
Not currently, sorry. I will find a precision resistor supplier.
Ignoring precision, 0R links would be a useful inclusion.
Came here to say the same thing! 0R would be useful (you have 1R already).
Newark often has decent pricing on reels. A year ago I bought 5000 Panasonic 0603 15K resistors for $5. They’re labeled 5%, but in more than a dozen that I’ve tested, they’ve all been well within 1%.
Awesome. Can you monetise your trash and sell us a few empty reels too? I’d like to split a few reels of common values with a friend and we don’t want to end up with miles of loose tape and nothing to store it on.
Let me ask the PCBA people, I imagine thats no problem.
I’ve seen kids in HQB using them like hockey pucks, suspect they’re easy to find.
Superb.
Gotta ask – where are you headed with that db info? Are you intending to share it – even as a paid service? Or are you looking to do introductions or expand the shop range or ….?
You see, what we’re doing is building a database of business cards. We’ll sell unlimited subscriptions for $20 a month.You might be like “WOW! thats a lot of value for only $20”, and you’d be right. So if you want to pay more, you can!
—
Sorry, a little Chaxor joke there.
You’re right though, there is an end goal. With this 132K part database from HQB, and the index of parts used in every github eagle project we did last month, you can start to do some interesting stuff :)
Wonderful. Hope we can all hear more news on this soon.
This is a great service. I don’t need any parts at the moment but I’ve ordered a couple of reels and some other bits to help build up the volume of sales with your suppliers.
Good luck with this and I can’t wait for “Custom Cables” and “Part of the Month Club”.
I have tried searching and encountered a small design flaw. When you have more than 23 pages of results, then the pagination buttons start to overlap search results. Issue can be seen if you search for example “1”.
So when is Dirty Assembly going online? We need a PCB assembly service to go along with Dirty PCBs.
I have orderd some reels but dont get a progress notification.
I created a ticket but get no response. how long will it take to get reels shipped?
Hi Markus,
I’m really sorry for the delay. I don’t know why the support ticket w@snt handled and I do apologize. We started dirty reels a week before spring festival and unlike our PCB service we didn’t know they would be closed at the point we sent in the po. Not really really closed, just unable to fill our order and not caring to deal with it before the month long holiday.
We did send out a notice, but our site is still beta so it could have failed or been spammed.
As of this week all reel orders have been shipped. It is midnight on china but tomorrow first thing someone in support will get back to you.
Sorry again for the delay and thanks for trying dirty reels.
Regards,
Ian