Building "one"

A rectangle of "Paxolin" (synthetic resin bonded paper) board with a row of eyelets along each long side. In the days of valve equipment, they were used to support rows of condensers and resistors which were physically too big to string between valveholder pins.

Tagstrips are the same thing with just one row of eyelets, sometimes with standoff tags at intervals to allow it to be bolted to the chassis.

A universal low-level audio signal amplifier using the larger size of tagboard is shown (rather fuzzily) at:

The smaller size tagboard is used in the front panel mixer of a large P.A. amplifier (the input preamps are on tagboards underneath the shielding brackets at the bottom of the picture:

Under the chassis of the amplifier is a mixture of small tagboards for the op-amps and long tagstrips to connect the banks of TO220 driver transistors, which are bolted directly to lengths of alloy angle section:

If you are interested, the circuit diagram of that brute is at:

I expect supplies will soon start to dry up here, as fewer and fewer people bother to learn how to solder up circuits by hand. Stripboard was never a very good teaching aid: there were too many ways for it to go wrong and it was so difficult to fault-find that the student wasted too much time on it and never got to learn how things *should* work.

This is the best kind of advertising - word of mouth from a satisfied customer. I saw a sign in some business one day: "If you don't like the service, please tell us - if you do, tell everybody else!" or something like that. :-)

Cheers! Rich

Ah! Those have never been common here. I happen to have some, dating from the 1950s.

You're doing some interesting things!

Here in the US, Keystone Electronics still has a wide variety of boards, many different turrets, etc., listed in their catalogs. But none of the catalog houses regularly carry them (although you can usually order through them with lead times in the weeks to months, I have done this through Digikey in the past.)

I'm afraid that with turnaround times of a few days at ExpressPCB for a custom PCB, and with lead times of months for stripboard, that the custom PC board is going to win most of the time.

Tim.

You can get a half-dozen small plated-through, solder-coated boards from AP Circuits in under a week, for $60 or so, and you won't have FeCl stains under your fingernails.

John

Or get yourself banned from the kitchen for getting FeCl stains in your wife's oven ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Could that really be considered "FeCless" behaviour?

Cheers Terry

Yep. I did it (once) about 35 years ago ;-)

...Jim Thompson

My last board was 4x6 and I needed and made only ONE of it and had it available approximately two hours after I finished the layout (etched drilled ... components and sockets soldered)

If I needed 4 or more ... or needed to do production runs Ill contact the PCB houses ... not before.

By the way my boards are layed out on two sides ... but etched on a single sided board with VIAS ... I drill out via holes and run jumper wire ... its very neat and clean.

I can etch on both sides if I have to ... and have done this ... I just generally prefer not to ... since I dont do enough on the component side to warrant it ...

I posted an example on a.b.schematic.electronic

I haven't made my own etched boards since high school. :-) For

Well, that's probably enough to learn that once is enough! ;-)

(although, if you ain't got a hundred bucks, it might be the only option. )-;

Thanks! Rich

Rich, if you aint got a hunnerd bicks, you have a wide variety of problems, and DIY pcbs are the least of them :)

Cheers Terry

Well, notwithstanding it's "hundred," ( ;-) ) , I have a wide variety of situations available for my contemplation, which can also be looked at as "opportunities." :-) It's mostly a matter of deciding what I want to focus on.

And, being the laziest man on Earth, I find myself in a quite reasonably tolerable situation - I get to sit in my office and annoy people all around the world, and I get to smoke in my office. Sometimes in my office, I play video games.

I'm in hog heaven, except for the lack of the all-important blow job. )-;

Thanks! Rich

If you mean "one that is going to be used" I make a PCB for it.

-Mike

We've finally learned our lesson about test sets: do real drawings, real pcb's, real parts lists. In other words, treat test fixtures and test sets just like sellable products.

John