Bought this thing on Amazon for $25, figuring it’s not a calibrated decade box, but it’s also 1/10 of the price of more professional pieces of gear. Overall look and fit is reasonable until one looks inside the unit.

Front view- switch positions are not color coded, but overall looks pretty good

Fancy handle

Everything is in series

Lots of splashes and overall messiness

More mess

Note solder ball near the right switch

Another solder ball near the left switch

All the solder balls I shook out

Summary:

• You get a nice set of 1% 1W resistors and switches
• All parts are soldered, though the amount of solder splashes and solder balls is rather excessive. (See a nice collection of solder balls I shook out of it)
• All resistors are bypassed by default, so unless you remember to leave a switch on you get a nice short across the terminals
• Lower ranges see higher percentage of resistance due to all the switch contacts in series.
• Higher values are closer to nominal
• It’d be nice if switches had a marking on them to indicate on or off state

Overall opinion:

“it’ll do” for general lab use, though you may want to shake all the extra solder off first.