Create Your Own Resistor

This is a very basic experiment where you can create your own resistor with a soft lead pencil. You do this by drawing a line with the soft lead pencil on a sheet of paper. You then take a multimeter and place the probes on the mark to measure its resistance. If you have a manual ranging multimeter, place it on the highest resistance.

Just a note, you may have to draw over the line a few times to make sure enough lead gets traced on the sheet of paper. If not, it will read too high of a resistance, so trace it over a few times.

The lead mark that the pencil makes will have a very high resistance, usually of a few megohms. The shorter of a line you draw, the lower the resistance and the longer the line you draw, the greater the resistance. Below is a sample line that was drawn and the resistances that were measured.

We drew one line and measured the resistance at several intervals on the line. The shorter the distance between the multimeter probes, the lower the resistance and the longer the distance between the probes, the greater the resistance.

This is just a basic experiment, but one which demonstrates resistance pretty well.