Do you frequently find yourself looking for odd-ball resistor values or soldering resitors together to try to get as close as possible to some uncommon E96 (1% resistor) value?  If you make a lot of prototypes, you might be happy to learn that most major resistor manufacturers offer resistor ‘kits’ containing a certain number of every value.  While they aren’t cheap, they do represent a fair value for the amount of work involved packaging and producing them, and if you’re really serious about electronics it can be reassuring to know that you have every value you might need.

To find different kits, you can search Digikey for some variation of this phrase: “res kit 1% 0805″ (changing the package size to match what you want), or here are the Digikey part numbers for some kits manufactured by Yageo (who typically have very competitive prices on their reels of resistors):

0805 1% Resistors (50 of each value):
1.0-9.76: PHC1A-KIT-ND
10.0-97.6: PHC2A-KIT-ND
100-976: PHC3A-KIT-ND
1.00K-9.76K: PHC4A-KIT-ND
10.0K-97.6K: PHC5A-KIT-ND
100K-1.0M: PHC6A-KIT-ND

0603 1% Resistors (50 of each value)
1.0-7.5: PHH1-KIT-ND
10.0-97.6: PHH2-KIT-ND
100-976: PHH3-KIT-ND
1.00K-9.76K: PHH4-KIT-ND
10.0K-97.6K: PHH5-KIT-ND
100K-1M: PHH6-KIT-ND