Oh dear, this thread is going to be very dating! I've got a loft full of components gathered over the years, mostly obsolete.
It all started with a crystal set, early teens, that should give you some idea! Around 20 yards of aerial, water pipe earth, and all I ever got was mains hum!:Biggrin2:
Progressed in stages, from there to a "miniature" 7 valve (6K7 push-pull o/p no less) superhet, using mainly ex WD components (about the size of a small suitcase).
Bending aluminium for a chassis, holes for valve holders, winding coils, controls all over the place etc, just for clear radio Luxembourg. Soon got fed up.
Then the next "big" thing, transistors. Started with just red spot (AF) and white spot (RF), yellow/green spot (who knew) they didn't even have numbers!
Shortly afterwards, the messy business of making PCBs, mainly modified to suit, but occasionally designed from scratch, never got on with Veroboard.
Interesting, but adolescent life eventually got in the way. When that stabilized, I still had a passing interest repairing TVs as a sideline, back in the days when people could manage without one for more than a few hours. I gave up round about the time VCRs became available, too complicated to be worth the bother, and a bit of a throwback, rather like wind turbines.
I still have 2 oscilloscopes, gathering dust, one circa 1980, the other around 1995.
By the time the hobby interest returned, everything had to be "digital". I enjoyed working out how to make things I needed with the early CMOS logic chips, but published designs for digital dice and digital egg timers etc just left me cold. I got into PICs for a while, but the novelty soon wore off.
Looking back, the most useful home built items have been the more specialized test gear, some still in use, some mothballed for memories. They were less mass produced, and cost effective to build. Even these are incorporated in the higher end multimeters now, and surface mount has just about put an end to anything I can reasonably make, or even repair.
Still can't resist the occasional dabble though. Last year I fancied a more powerful ultrasonic cleaner, somewhere between the "toy" ones and the expensive industrial versions. I ordered a couple of ultrasonic transducers from China first, because of the shipping delay, so committed before really totting up the total component cost. Along the way, another programmer had to be built for the microprocessors. It's essentially two separate transducer ccts sharing a common bath, each sweeping the most effective cleaning frequencies to different patterns, when used in tandem. It fizzes and spits a lot, and worked well on a few test objects. Total cost around £200, a lot of interest building it, but never used it since. I saw the Australian version recently on U tube. It's an orbital sander attached to an old oil drum, with bungees.
I feel so silly now!:Biggrin2:
