Can you actually find decent tools and parts for retro repair on Temu? I’ve been critical of Temu in a past video, and they got in touch more than once. Rather than me deleting that video, they asked for a right of reply and gave me a budget of around £150 to review some of their stuff. So I tried to pick genuinely useful items and avoid the chuff. This is part one: a 3D printer tent, an LCR-TC1 component tester, resistors, turned pin IC sockets, transistors and a Qanba Gravity silent joystick, with mixed results.
Small tools: scalpel, scissors and a pink fan
The handheld rechargeable fan (pink, because it was cheapest) charges over micro USB, has three speeds and did a good job cooling my face on a hot day. Setting three blows the label off the bench. The six piece “aluminium carving knife” set is a scalpel with five spare blades, very sharp, and cheaper than where I usually buy them: I use these constantly for deburring 3D prints. The 99p scissors are decent quality too.
3D printer tent
Something I’ve wanted for ages for my Creality CR-6 SE. I was meant to leave it boxed because I’m packing up to move (I can’t afford my current space any more), but I couldn’t resist. It’s a good size, easily big enough for the CR-6 SE, with fibreglass poles (wear gloves for splinters), a reflective silver interior, a grommeted inlet for the power cable and fan holes on either side. It gets hot in there quickly.
Fuses, and is the LCR-TC1 component tester any good?
A 100 piece kit of 5x20mm fast blow glass fuses for £4.49, because I’m sick of buying them individually. Then the LCR-TC1, a tester I’ve had my eye on for years, at £13.18. It feels well built, but the tiny included leaflet is frankly wrong; the instructions online are much better. Pop an LED in backwards and it reads it as a zener diode, which is understandable as it’s reverse biased.
The real test was the cheap 10µF capacitor supplied in the accessories. The LCR-TC1 read 12.08µF with 2.7% Vloss and an ESR of 4.6 ohms, far too high. My Peak Atlas ESR Plus (about £120) read 11.01µF and 5.8 ohms. For finding bad capacitors you only need a ballpark figure, and both flagged it as bad. At £13, it’s a no-brainer.
Resistors, test hooks, IC sockets and transistors
The 1,450 piece kit of 1% quarter watt resistors (1 ohm to 1 megohm) is great value at £9.99 and identical, printing and all, to the kit I usually buy elsewhere. The test hook clips are really good quality, but I ordered 4mm when I needed 2mm, so my probe tips fall straight out. My bad.
The turned pin DIP sockets were the big win. Turned pin sockets have far more robust contacts than the cheap kind (just make sure you clean all the old solder off reused chips, or they won’t seat well). Quality was consistent across all seven sizes, at around half what you’d pay on auction sites. The only gap: no wide sockets for things like EPROMs. The 600 piece TO-92 NPN and PNP transistor set comes in nice cases, and since they vanish whenever you drop one, spares are welcome.
Qanba Gravity silent joystick
The priciest item at about £38, for a joystick and keypad combo I’m designing for a ColecoVision video. The appeal over a microswitch stick is near silence; I can’t stand the racket microswitch joysticks make. The tin, paperwork and wiring instructions all feel genuine, and under the stick cover there’s a Qanba authenticity hologram. Inside: a hammered blue ball top, circular and octagonal restrictor gates (octagonal for the ColecoVision, I think), a harness from the five pin connector, and springs to change the throw at 1.5x and 2x. It’s heavy, smooth and really, really quiet.
So, £150 well spent?
There’s plenty of old chuff on Temu, but by picking carefully I think I avoided it. The tester, sockets, resistors, scalpel and joystick are all things I’d buy again. Part two covers more tools and project parts. The Temu links and discount codes from the time are in the video description; check they’re still valid before relying on them.
More from the Temu tool challenge: Temu Haul 2: Are Cheap Tools Worth It for Retro Electronics Repair?.
Related
More on testing and soldering kit in my top 13 tools for fixing stuff, and other joysticks I’ve built and reviewed: the ArcadeR joystick and Monster Joysticks.
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