junk sale find?

[snz728]

Can anyone tell me if any of this is worthwhile?  I found them at a junk sale.

A few axial caps say Sprague Vitamin Q,

the top hat or flying saucer transistors have no printing on them at all (hoping they are germanium fuzz face goodness) NEED HELP IDENTIFYING THESE

and the bowl of axial caps are greasy and mostly brown or covered in wire with no printing on them either.

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[midwayfair]

Those top hats are almost definitely silicon, but you can test by setting up an HFE tester and holding your finger to them. The gain will rise if they are germanium. If you determine the gain range and they're silicon, just use them for anything you like.

The stuff in the bowl is probably worth very little, though them might be cool if you want to build a mojo-riffic fuzz and they're in the right range ...

The vitamin qs are worth $2 -- if they still work. They might be old enough to be dead-ish.

[snz728]

Dang! I was hoping those were Russian Germaniums, I guess I'll have to break down and buy them from Smallbear for my GE Fuzz Face dreams.  I will have to sort through the rest and test the caps for some mojo if I build a FF

[midwayfair]

Dang! I was hoping those were Russian Germaniums, I guess I'll have to break down and buy them from Smallbear for my GE Fuzz Face dreams.  I will have to sort through the rest and test the caps for some mojo if I build a FF

Did you test them and they weren't germanium? You have to test them

They won't be Russian, I can tell you that. They look like TI to me. But you should test them. Old silicon transistors can be really useful, because they often have low gain ranges that can't be had in modern silicon transistors.

[snz728]

Whipped up a quick transistor tester but didn't have 2M2 resistor or 2K49 (used 2M and 2k2 instead ) and got a reading that was pretty stable and while I didn't have a free hand and my basement is pretty cold I decided to breathe some hot air on the transistor and the reading went up every time I did it by about.02