Reference desk / FAQ
Questions before you trust the part relationship.
Practical guidance for identifying industrial parts, reading evidence, handling uncertainty, and choosing the right Kernspoke workflow.
9 questions, one evidence standard
Lookup accepts a manufacturer and part number. It is designed to help you inspect a published industrial part record, its evidence trail, and any documented relationships before you specify, compare, or investigate a substitution.
A lookup can be exact, an alias, ambiguous, no-match, or insufficient-evidence. Those states describe what the reviewed record can establish about the submitted manufacturer and part number; they are not a promise that a near-looking reference is the same part.
An obsolete or malformed reference may return no-match or insufficient-evidence rather than a guessed identity. Check the manufacturer and part number as printed, review any returned suggestions or alias state, and send the source or correction details to support when the reference needs investigation.
Source trails identify the publisher, document title, URL, retrieval date, and locator. Confidence describes how strongly the reviewed evidence supports the result. If a source set does not document a field, Kernspoke keeps it explicitly unknown rather than filling the gap with an assumption.
No. A documented cross-reference or complementary relationship is evidence of that documented relationship only. It is not a drop-in-replacement claim, an engineering approval, or a guarantee of interchangeability or compatibility in every application. Confirm electrical, mechanical, and application requirements before substitution.
Use the Contact page for source corrections, record questions, and commercial enquiries. Include the manufacturer, part number, source URL or document locator, and the field, claim, or relationship that needs checking so the record can be assessed against its evidence.
Free is $0 and includes 5 interactive lookups per UTC month. The core lookup shows evidence, possible alternatives, compatibility limits, and a verifiable buying path when the reviewed source record provides one. Verified public result pages are quota-free.
Independent is US$39.50/month with 25 interactive lookups per UTC month. It keeps the complete core lookup value for individual engineers, independent suppliers, and smaller distributors, but does not include private projects, exports, API access, bulk CSV/BOM lookup, or shared workspaces.
Professional is US$79/month with 100 interactive lookups per UTC month. It adds private research projects, multi-line comparisons, evidence provenance, reports and printable views, CSV export, API access, bulk CSV/BOM lookup, and shared workspaces with team membership.
