Hello fellow sparkies. I have a diode question. Im looking at an old electical drawing and on the material list, it calls for EGC 1N4001 diodes. I searched the Internet and could not find a manufacturer EGC nor could I cross reference.
The manufacturer you were looking for is "ECG", not "EGC".
ECG was a division of Philips, which marketed replacement semiconductors for the repair industry. Absorbed into NTE Electronics, which serves essentially the same market:
http://www.nteinc.com/I did have multiple hits with the 1N4001. Is the number more of a specific type of diode then a manufactors part number?
The 1N4001 (and all the other "1Nxxx, 2Nxxx" numbers are JEDEC ("joint Electron Device Engineering Council", a subcommittee of the EIA) type numbers. Back in the days before everything went proprietary, most semiconductor manufacturers registered their devices with the EIA/JEDEC, and assigned them industry standard type numbers. Before JEDEC started registering diodes and transistors, they did the same thing for vacuum tubes, making sure that a 12AU7 was a 12AU7, whether you got it from RCA, Sylvania, or whoever.
In other words, a brand A's 1N4001 diode is in principle the same as brand B and brand C's 1N4001 diode?
Yep. a 1N4001 is a 50V, 1A general purpose silicon rectifier. A true commodity part, available for a few pennies apiece from just about any electronic parts supplier.
