A picture catalog of electronics.

[Roger Johansson]

In 1945 Two friends, Nils Jensen and Arne Lydmar started, a small shop
in Stockholm, selling and repairing bicycles and electronic components.

Nils took a job on an ocean liner as a stewart, and made two trips to
New York.
Both times he brought as much electronics as he could carry aboard
during the stay. There was a lot of cheap military surplus for sale
after the war.

He got some contacts during these trips with people on board who agreed
to act as his agents, so he could quit being a steward and get back to
the bicycle and electronics shop.

The ELFA catalog grew year by year, and the last 20 years have been a
long struggle with the 1 kilogram limit the post office had, before it
gets much more expensive.

20 years ago they started printing the catalog on special super thin
"bible paper". Then they made it bigger sideways, so to speak, every
page became 4x size, that saved a lot of not-wasted margins, and
made it possible to cram in more information for a few years more.

Luckily for ELFA they are now saved by the bell, internet use is
spreading and people all over the world learn to handle the web.
Less people really need a paper catalog, so ELFA can increase the
information on the web site, without having to print more or bigger
paper catalogs.
The web site becomes the number one information channel, and the paper
catalog can omit some parts of the full sortiment, and refer to the web.

ELFA has upheld very high standards in service, technical expertise,
reliable deliveries for 60 years, acting to further knowledge and use
of electronics in my country for 60 years now.

Personally I have a collection of 40 ELFA catalogs, and they are all
well used, with lots of pieces of masking tape marking pages.

I can honestly say that ELFA has given me more than I have paid for,
and always been very correct and easy to do business with. I have
walked into their shop in Solna many times, and in spite of often being
dressed more like a hippie than an engineer I have always been treated
very nicely.

One windy and rainy autum night I walked out from ELFA with my first
oscilloscope. I protected it like a baby from the wind and rain under
my jacket while walking through Stockholm.

Even people who seldom bought anything from ELFA had use for the
catalog. It was like the hitchhikers guide to the world of electronics.
And it had a giant resistance color code strip on the spine of the book.
If you had the ELFA catalog in the bookshelf you only had to glance at
it from over the room to check what a certain color means.

The catalog is still sent out in many paper copies, in several
languages, and now it is available in english on the web too.

http://www.elfa.se/en/

Here is the story of ELFA, in english, which I stumbled upon while
looking for component pictures. I found it interesting and a nice read.

http://www.elfa.se/en/about-3.html

I hope they translate the blue fact pages to english too, and put them
on the web. But this catalog on the web is already a great resource.
With pictures and descriptions of 55000 components, instruments, tools,
books, software. Everything you need for working with electronics.

Let's say you want the pinout for the cmos circuit 4017.
It is quicker to look it up on the ELFA site than to go to a book shelf
and look it up in a paper data book.
Click on the small picture to get a full size picture.
The data sheet button opens the data sheet from the manufacturer.

I do a search for TL071, and get two hits in ELFA's search engine.
One is a table of op-amps and their most important characteristics, for
comparison and finding the right op-amp for a certain task.

The other hit is the op-amp family TL071/2/4-TL081,TL061, etc..
This page gives pinouts and basic data for each member of the family.
And a per piece price for each type of packaging and prices for
typically 1, 50, or a 100 pieces.

Each product in the pricelist below has two buttons, one info button
which gives some details about the component in a popup window, the
other button lets you download and open the data sheet in a pdf file.


--
Roger J.

 

[Robert Baer]

Roger Johansson wrote:

In 1945 Two friends, Nils Jensen and Arne Lydmar started, a small shop
in Stockholm, selling and repairing bicycles and electronic components.

Nils took a job on an ocean liner as a stewart, and made two trips to
New York.
Both times he brought as much electronics as he could carry aboard
during the stay. There was a lot of cheap military surplus for sale
after the war.

He got some contacts during these trips with people on board who agreed
to act as his agents, so he could quit being a steward and get back to
the bicycle and electronics shop.

The ELFA catalog grew year by year, and the last 20 years have been a
long struggle with the 1 kilogram limit the post office had, before it
gets much more expensive.

20 years ago they started printing the catalog on special super thin
"bible paper". Then they made it bigger sideways, so to speak, every
page became 4x size, that saved a lot of not-wasted margins, and
made it possible to cram in more information for a few years more.

Luckily for ELFA they are now saved by the bell, internet use is
spreading and people all over the world learn to handle the web.
Less people really need a paper catalog, so ELFA can increase the
information on the web site, without having to print more or bigger
paper catalogs.
The web site becomes the number one information channel, and the paper
catalog can omit some parts of the full sortiment, and refer to the web.

ELFA has upheld very high standards in service, technical expertise,
reliable deliveries for 60 years, acting to further knowledge and use
of electronics in my country for 60 years now.

Personally I have a collection of 40 ELFA catalogs, and they are all
well used, with lots of pieces of masking tape marking pages.

I can honestly say that ELFA has given me more than I have paid for,
and always been very correct and easy to do business with. I have
walked into their shop in Solna many times, and in spite of often being
dressed more like a hippie than an engineer I have always been treated
very nicely.

One windy and rainy autum night I walked out from ELFA with my first
oscilloscope. I protected it like a baby from the wind and rain under
my jacket while walking through Stockholm.

Even people who seldom bought anything from ELFA had use for the
catalog. It was like the hitchhikers guide to the world of electronics.
And it had a giant resistance color code strip on the spine of the book.
If you had the ELFA catalog in the bookshelf you only had to glance at
it from over the room to check what a certain color means.

The catalog is still sent out in many paper copies, in several
languages, and now it is available in english on the web too.

http://www.elfa.se/en/

Here is the story of ELFA, in english, which I stumbled upon while
looking for component pictures. I found it interesting and a nice read.

http://www.elfa.se/en/about-3.html

I hope they translate the blue fact pages to english too, and put them
on the web. But this catalog on the web is already a great resource.
With pictures and descriptions of 55000 components, instruments, tools,
books, software. Everything you need for working with electronics.

Let's say you want the pinout for the cmos circuit 4017.
It is quicker to look it up on the ELFA site than to go to a book shelf
and look it up in a paper data book.
Click on the small picture to get a full size picture.
The data sheet button opens the data sheet from the manufacturer.

I do a search for TL071, and get two hits in ELFA's search engine.
One is a table of op-amps and their most important characteristics, for
comparison and finding the right op-amp for a certain task.

The other hit is the op-amp family TL071/2/4-TL081,TL061, etc..
This page gives pinouts and basic data for each member of the family.
And a per piece price for each type of packaging and prices for
typically 1, 50, or a 100 pieces.

Each product in the pricelist below has two buttons, one info button
which gives some details about the component in a popup window, the
other button lets you download and open the data sheet in a pdf file.


And ELFA seems to be "famous"; i have known of them for over 30 years.

 

[Joerg]

Hello Roger,

One windy and rainy autum night I walked out from ELFA with my first
oscilloscope. I protected it like a baby from the wind and rain under
my jacket while walking through Stockholm.

I remember them days. I still have that old Hameg scope. It doesn't
trigger but "synchronizes". Do you still have yours?

http://www.elfa.se/en/

Thanks. I checked it out. Seems pretty expensive, like about one Euro
for a HC4060. Ouch. Our local store sold them to me for about a third.
But then again I remember when I was in Sweden that going to a pub for a
beer can cost you a pretty penny as well.

Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

 

[Roger Johansson]

Joerg wrote:

I remember them days. I still have that old Hameg scope. It doesn't
trigger but "synchronizes". Do you still have yours?

I built my own timebase section, a triggered sweep based on a window
comparator and constant current into a capacitor. I used a cheap trick
to build the constant current generator, I took 150 Volt from inside
the scope and switched in resistors which set the current from that
high voltage. A 4027 flip-flop made sure the previous sweep was over
before it allowed a new sweep to be triggered.
I sold it when I was going to get a new scope.

The new scope was far from "new", by the way.

There was a medical institution in Sweden which was going to build
special medical monitors. But they didn't want to build them from
scratch. They bought hundreds of half made scopes, Gould OS300, only
the crt and power supply, plus some basic functions.

People who read electronics magazines during the 60ies and 70ies will
probably remember the big ad pages for Gould OS300. It was compared
with a DC3 aeroplane in quality, reliability and sturdyness, NATO
approved, etc...

The project was laid off, and hundreds of half built scopes flooded the
swedish surplus market.
The biggest surplus firm, BHIAB, bought them and created a kit and
schematics for building the vertical channels and the time base
controls.

One of the halfmade scopes was faulty, so it was sold/given to a person
who would try to repair it.
He couldn't find the fault, so I got it for a very low price from him.
I found the fault in 10 minutes, changed a transistor, problem solved.
Then I built the section that was to go in the big hole in the front of
the scope, beside the screen..

http://www.elfa.se/en/

Thanks. I checked it out. Seems pretty expensive, like about one Euro
for a HC4060. Ouch.

Yes, ELFA is not famous for being the cheapest alternative, but always
the most reliable.
If you buy 100 of each component you get a much better price, and ELFA
has sometimes surprised me with having the lowest price on some
semiconductors. Other stuff take a lot of space in their store, and
may stay on a shelf for 20 years before being sold. To finance such
storing costs for that gigantic sortiment they need to take out a
higher price.

The idea is that when you can buy all components, tools and other stuff
in one single place you gain on freight and other costs.

Our local store sold them to me for about a
third. But then again I remember when I was in Sweden that going to a
pub for a beer can cost you a pretty penny as well.

The big part of the beer price is tax. We have used high prices to
regulate the alcohol consumption for more than 100 years.
This policy is now coming to an end, we cannot have significantly
different prices when the borders inside EU are open and we can buy as
much beer abroad as we like. The prices of alcohol are still high, but
have been lowered in several steps, and soon we will se alcohol being
sold in supermarkets, like they do in most European countries.


--
Roger J.