Resistors - not quite ten a penny!

[Yorkie]

Clearly anyone who wishes to use resistors or any other components for that matter in safety critical situations wouldn't be buying bargain bags off e-bay, but as I've said before, I'm a hobbyist - I'm not putting rockets into space. That said, I can't really think of  many, if any, situations in which 0.25 Watt resistors such as these are likely to have very high voltage across them. and presumably it's the potential difference across the resistor that determines is ability to survive. Hence, if a resistor is required say to drop voltage at a point in a circuit from 250V to 150V, it needs to tolerate 100V - not 250V, or am I missing something?

The resistors at the link I gave were bought by a chum to experiment with simple 555 IC projects, for which I'm sure they'd be ideal.

Just a question of which factory in China they came from I guess. Clearly one that's well geared up to turning out bandoliered resistors by the million!

To ramble off into irrelevancies, who knows where anything comes from nowadays? Mostly China it seems - certainly much of the stuff bought from Maplin in the last 20 years or more.

Maplin Far East Operations was first established in 1992 due to the increase in the purchasing of items from Taiwan followed by Hong Kong and China. To strengthen buying power, the Maplin Electronics set up its first Far Eastern branch office in Taipei, Taiwan, in charge of product sourcing, purchasing, inspecting, shipping and payment arrangement from Taiwan and is now the Far East Operations Centre. The Hong Kong Office was established in 1995 to handle the sourcing, purchasing and shipping from Hong Kong. Most production in Taiwan and Hong Kong has moved to Shenzhen, Mainland China. The 3 offices in the Far East handle more than 500 suppliers and 5,000 buying items for the parent company.

Incidentally, Since 2014, Maplin has been owned by Rutland Partners, which  also owns Pizza Hut UK and Bernard Matthews.

Bootiful!