Yes. An order placed a day before the one that took 3 months showed up in about 2 weeks. Both with the same shipping method. Just unpredictable at times.
FWIW - the order that took forever apparently at in Chicago for most of that time according to the tracking. I was starting to think USPS had lost it for sure. Then it showed up at my door.
Yeah, that’s where almost all the variation is — it gets to the US within a few days or a week, and it gets from wherever it gets processed to your door in a few days, but it spends a couple days or a couple months in between, apparently just sitting somewhere.
Oh and I have ordered a bunch of ESP8266 node-mcu’s with and without wifi. They all are cheap knockoffs, costs 1-2 USD. But seem to work just fine, one of them has been operating a relay for 3 years now 24/7.
Currently having sort of a hard time finding the correct form factor pots for the APCAPCAPC in Canada, I may just have to order from the UK 
So I just received that dirt cheap bag of TL074 from Aliexpress.
Doing a quick swap on my oscillator circuit shows me that they are definitely different.
How it should look vs. how it looks with the Ali chips:
Pretty bad picture on this one, but notice how ramp starts to look like triangle, and amplification level is way off the original:
DON’T TRUST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE PRICES NO IC’S
welp… this is not good to hear, I had just ordered a bunch of them and TL072 the other week 
Now I just gotta wait and see if I get lucky or not…
How much does it matter actually matter that they’re a bit… special? What will happen if you use them? Is that just a triangle wave VCO made with the chip? Extra harmonics for free? 
I also just gambled on a bunch of these.
How cheap is dirt cheap? Looking on Amazon, I can buy them at £2.75 with free postage for a batch of 10.
2.70 USD for 40 pcs.
what I think might be happening is, if you get counterfeit ones that actually work as opamps, they are usually rebranded lm324s, which have a much smaller slewrate (~0.5V/us vs the TL074s ~13V/us) which means it will act somewhat like lowpass filter, mangling or even disappearing with high frequencies…
as a result, if you want to get a halfway decent(as in 20% of the duty cycle being slopes from high to low) 10Vpp square wave, you’d be limited to 3kHz, otherwise your square wave might as well be a triangle wave (if you really want to use them anyway, you could just work with way lower voltages internally and use an output amplifier to get back to the desired levels, but keep in mind that as counterfeit chips, they might have other disadvantages and have worse specs than datasheet lm324s or even be completely different ICs)
But most importantly, its sucks to get scammed haha
my recommendation would be to have a test setup in a breadboard to quickly test if they work as intended (or close enough), such as a unity gain follower or a simple oscillator (to check how high you can push the frequencies), but you’ll need and oscilloscope to test like this
I suppose it all depends on whether you think 20 reliably sourced chips for less than the price of a pint of Guinness is affordable.
My conclusion was also that they are rebranded LM324’s. My suspicion initially came from one of the ones I got actually being labeled LM324, but otherwise looking identical.
Those bags also don’t look like they would protect from esd at all. Hell those antistatic pink bags don’t either, they are just esd neutral and don build up charge.
I got refund of 5USD on all those “TL074” from Aliexpress.
If you need LM13700’s for your funky filter, Tayda was out of stock, they only got 70 back in stock a few days ago already down to 23.
They were out of stock a month or so ago too, I picked up 10 a couple weeks ago.
The best alternative I could find was to pay $5 in shipping for $4 in LM13700’s from Digikey.
I just got today my shipping from Tayda, which included 10x LM13700 among pots and other stuff.
That’s the first time it took over 14 days, and it doubled right to 28 days !!!
I hope this will stay as an exception.
Thonk now has pot shaft adapters for a reasonable price. Just stocked up.
Do they have them to other way round ?
My pots have 6.35mm shafts and my knobs have 6mm holes.
I ordered a 6.35mm drill bit, we’ ll see if that goes somewhere…
