I ordered some IRLZ34 MOSFETs from Futurlec and they finally arrived, shipped from Hong Kong. I took one out of the bag and it was marked IRFZ34. What!?!? I ordered IRLZ34, not IRFZ34!! I took the rest out of the bag and I counted 33 of the IRFZ34, and 2 of IRF9Z34, which are not only the wrong part, but the wrong polarity! Someone really screwed up, and mixed the wrong parts together! I emailed them, and they promised to send me replacements. But they ran out of stock, most likely because they checked the ones in their parts bin and found that most of them were the wrong part. So they are going to ship me 18 replacements and give me credit for the remaining 17 they couldn’t replace.
This should make everyone aware that the parts companies do make major mistakes, and when you receive the parts, you should check a good percentage of them to make sure they’re really what you ordered. I’ve had the same problem with Mouser. They have also sent me parts on tape, where I could hold the two different part up and see that one tape of 50 capacitors, for example, was obviously shorter than the other tape of 50 capacitors. That’s an immediate clue that there’s something wrong.
Back to counting parts…