Solid State Sleuths (Episode One)

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Seems like testing zener voltage levels might not be a healthy way to go for a transistor that you might want to save

Oh well let's do it 

So much for that plan

I used this circuit and applied voltage

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Slowly applying voltage up to 10V until.... nothing happened

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Maybe use a smaller resistor

I checked my connections

I hate to just bbq the poor thing

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I changed R1 to a 1.7 ohm resistor and didn't get any different results

I figured maybe this TO-220 might be too much of a beast so I tried a 2N3904 and got some results

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Question is...is that little 2N3904 still good 

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Yes, NPN bi-polar like JM said.  The readings show that pin1 is the base.  Long ago someone told me that the higher forward reading will be the emitter, and in practice I have found this to be true (your readings .530 for emitter vs .523 for collector).
The reason I asked for the reverse readings is that voltage regulators will not usually give the same high readings in the reverse direction ("OL" or "1" on your meter).  So if there would have been some readings of 1.2 or 1.5 on the diode test I would have suspected it to be a voltage regulator.

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Now having said that, I'm a bit suspicious about the "1" readings on your diode test.  What does it read (on diode test) when the probes are not connected to anything?
Most meters are able to read more than a 1V drop on diode test but maybe not yours.

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As requested

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Retest

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