I've been tinkering with electronics for a very long time, since perhaps the age of 7 or 8 when I learned the resistor color code probibly from an article in Popular Electronics.

Using the "old" color code, I decide to adapt that scheme to my purposes. That statement makes it sound like you can't buy parts with color codes any more, but you can still buy axial leaded parts.

Some more history, The color code was composed of at least 12 colors, Black, Brown, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White, Gold and Silver. The colors were arranged in to at least three bands on a resistor but as many as five bands could be found on a resistor. If you held the resistor so that the band closest to an end of the resitor was in your left hand, the first digit would be on the far left side, the second band would be next reading left to right, and the multiplier digit would still farther to the right.

For example if a resistor read (left to right) red, red, red it would have a value of 2200 ohms, if it had a gold band to the right of the the third red band, it would have been designated as a 5% resistor. A more complicated example, just for fun, would be yellow, violet, gold, gold (reading left to right). That resistor would have a value of 4.7 ohms (47 X 0.1) 5% tolorance.

Higher precision resistors could also use the color code to identify them. A third band of significant digits would be added. So there would be at least four bands, the fourth band being the multiplier. These resistors didn't use the tolorance band but frequently had a fifth band that I don't know the exact meaning of.

Surface mount resistors and capacitors got so small that trying to mark them even with two or three characters became impractable, and the color code seemed to be a thing of past.

In order to make the kits much more assembliable I need to get away from hand gluing (double sticky tape) each component to a backing sheet. The SMT parts are supplied on tapes that are about the size of a 8mm movie film, that dates me also. The kit may use as few as one component and as many as 40 - 50 parts of a single part type.

So how on earth could this be applied to surface mount resisters? There so damned small! The other day I had an idea of how I could uniquely identify a part using the color code, I just need to decide how I would mark the parts.

The tape has a front side and a back side. The front side can be identified by a piece of plastic that can be lifted off to reveal the actual component in it's individual little compartment. The back side is covered with a thin paper tissue, the automatic equipment probably pushes the part through to the front side.

Front Side - Brown over Black

Let's divide the front of the tape longitudinally in about half, the first digit we'll define as having a color along the sprokets and the second digit will be the bottom half, the part with the clear plastic tape. On the back side let's define the third digit, only in the case of 1% or tigheter tolorance components, as a color longitudinally along the sprockets. Normally this will be left uncolored or white. The bottom half will be the multiplier band.

Back Side - Nil over Yellow

In the above example the resistor value would be 100K ohms (10 X 10000).

I've actually applied this scheme and ran into a couple of small problems. I was able to mark the tapes by using broad pointed "Sharpie" markers and running them along the edge of the tape. The time to mark several hundreds of parts is only a minute or so. One of the problems I ran into was that the pen set has all sorts of pretty colors but some of the darker shades do not differenciate very well. So I used the more pastel like colors. A second, but minor, problem was that there was no gray color, and the best substitute (based again on color differentiation) was pink. I also got carried away on some of the first tapes that I colored and used pink also for the color white, but there is no reason that the natural color of the tape would work just fine for the white color.

Another problem that came up, some of the larger parts are on clear tape and you can see through the darn things and the back surface is rough and not very markable. These parts tended to be higher value capacitors and inductors. In this case I had to make due with only the front surface. I'm not sure I have a scheme I can always live with but in this case I departed almost entirely from the above scheme and used a broad stripe along the front sprocket to designate the multiplier and a thin or broad stripe over the bottom half to designnate the another parameter of the component. For example, a 10uF 6.3V capacitor might have the sprocket colored blue (10 X1000000) and perhaps a broad red stripe; while the 10uF at 16V might have a broad orange stripe. Some more thought needs to go into this.

Currently my kitting process has parts of different types in small coin envelops, for instance, all 5% resistors of the 0603 size will be found in one envelop and the 1% resistors would be found in a second envelop, and so on. Separating the Ceramic and Tantalum capacitors into different envelops, and SMT inductors into still another envelope.