[sdiy] Parts Substitutions Page

[Simon Gatrall]

>Please visit
>
>http://members.xoom.com/_XMCM/chordman/index.html
>
>Click the "parts substitution" link.
>
>I've put about 10 hours of additional work into this.
>
>Martin Czech sent me an email thread with 'favs', so
>I converted it to HTML (whew) and posted that too.
>
>If any of you have things to add, please email me.
>
>And I'd like to know what people think of the pages.
>
>Heh heh, far from perfect...
>
>-- Scott Gravenhorst | LegoManiac / Lego Trains / RIS 1.5
>-- Linux Rex         | RedWebMail by RedStarWare
>-- FatMan: www.teklab.com/~chordman
>-- NonFatMan: members.xoom.com/_XMCM/chordman/index.html

A source that I've used for professional reasons is 
http://www.freetradezone.com.  I'm not sure how useful it is for SDIY 
types of parts, but the database is very very large and the most of 
the links for PDFs and suppliers seem to work.  It has interesting 
features for searching for alternate parts based on the specs, but 
the database isn't always up to the task.

While not exactly a substitution resource, there is another place 
that I find very interesting for finding smaller quantities of 
surplus parts: http://www.usbid.com.  Mostly OEMs want to sell 
1000-100000 of some part of which they bought too many, but you do 
find some parts in smaller quantities (<100) that may be hard to 
locate any other way.  Depending on the seller, you can either buy at 
a fixed price, or there are auctioning and biding processes built 
into the system.  It is also a good way to sell any excess inventory 
of parts that you may have had to buy in quantity.

-s!mon