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I am fairly sure I bought this when I was ~14 at a actual RadioShack. I have several other spools but when you are hobbyist that has too littlie time on your hands, things like this last a long time. Well, that and I forget where the hell I packed things when moving so I buy more stuff.

I was working on a minor project and thought it was funny and that you might agree. Also, ive owned several of those "fire starter" irons they used to sell. Ive upgraded but still use some fairly basic stuff. @stupidbird

I am fairly sure I bought this when I was ~14 at a actual RadioShack. I have several other spools but when you are hobbyist that has too littlie time on your hands, things like this last a long time. Well, that and I forget where the hell I packed things when moving so I buy more stuff. I was working on a minor project and thought it was funny and that you might agree. Also, ive owned several of those "fire starter" irons they used to sell. Ive upgraded but still use some fairly basic stuff. @stupidbird

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[–] • 1 pt

I still have some rolls of Radio Shack cable kicking around, the stuff they sold was of surprisingly useful quality. I miss those spools of two conductor pure copper red/black 18GA they sold, that stuff was useful for everything.

I still have a non-grounded rat shack 1/4" tip solder iron that gets used a lot. It's just a weller-clone, and works fine. I may have some solder left, but I went with Kester 60/40 "44" core years ago. Not that the shack stuff was bad, the Kester was available to me through company purchases and I could get 1lb spools of varying sizes at a price that was equivalent to the 'shack's 8oz spools.

For the most part, I never had any problem with their tools or solder equipment.

[–] • 1 pt

Nice, yeah. Ive never had problems with it either. Even at the end if you could find what you wanted at the shack it was usually ok. It was really sad when the component section just kept getting smaller and smaller.... They were the product of an era where you were still expected and even encouraged to fix your own stuff or to even build things.

[–] • 2 pts

Some of their components were shit. For example, they sold a LM337 regulator - I swear those were floor sweepings because I could build the example circuit in the data manual and they'd self-destruct with noise.

Tools, solder, wire? No problem at all. They used to sell Pratt-Read rebrands and even had Xcelite tools for a while before Cooper moved them to China.