78xx output cap

That's the whole point of the thread. Please read the first few sentences of my opening post again.

Thanks for the suggestion. I work a lot with members of the medical profession including dental surgeons, but the idea of using a dental bit never occurred to me. If it's good enough to drill teeth, it should be good enough to drill FR4.

Well, it sounds a bit like gambling to me, and maybe risking the occasional oscillator. But, if it works for you....

I've been thinking about it for quite some time now. Maybe this is a good time to start.

I've accumulated a wide range of parts over the years, most of them bought on visits to the major cities and courtesy of friends. It's almost impossible to deal with Indian retailers from a distance and the bigger distributors ignore orders smaller than production quantities. The biggest obstacle to switching to SMT will be buying the parts.

In the past I have seen some suppliers offer boxes with assorted values surface mount components. Try and find that.

It will certainly do. I'll try it out with the next simple design, maybe a dozen or so components.

I have certain self-imposed rules while designing a PCB, one of which is to use as few jumpers as possible. Having dozens of them on a single board somehow seems clumsy to me.

And I really hate "those pesky crossovers" as you call them. Working on an existing product during a fault-finding session and/or when trying to improvise replacements with locally available parts, all without any kind of manual, it's often necessary to trace the circuit and reverse engineer it. It's easy to develop an intense dislike for those crossovers, especially when they occur every few millimeters.

Follow-up: Just finished calling a friend who runs a dental clinic with his wife who's also a dental surgeon. He happened to be away in Delhi but he said that he has a good stock of diamond and carbide burs. He told me to go to his clinic tomorrow and take whatever I need.

You want a bur with a ball shaped tip for drilling holes. The tips come in a variety of shapes, but AFAIK ball shape is best.

Ed