Tried bridging pads directly with solder on my last build and it actually worked

I did the same thing last winter on a little LED cube controller and it came out surprisingly tidy, though I learned a couple things the hard way. Short runs of two or three pads work fine with just a bead, but anything longer and the solder tends to blob up unevenly. I started laying bare wire from a scrap of hookup cable along the row first, then flowing solder over it, and the long traces came out straight and flat instead of lumpy.

Flux made a bigger difference than I expected. I was using an old no-clean pen from RadioShack leftovers and once I switched to a proper flux pen the solder stopped beading up and refusing to bridge. Also found that a chisel tip worked way better than a fine conical one for this, more thermal mass so the pads stay hot long enought to bond together.

The meter check after each row is the part I wish I'd done from the start. I found one bridge between a power rail and a data line only after the chip got warm, and had to rebuild half the board. Now I do the continuity check row by row before anything goes in.

Your tape-the-sketch idea is a good one. I snapped a photo of my layout drawing on my phone and kept it open next to me, which stopped most of my misreads but not all of them.

I tried this same trick a few years back on a little mixer strip and ended up abandoning it halfway through. The beads looked great on day one, but when I bolted the board into the case the whole thing flexed slightly and two of my longer runs cracked right at the pad. Solder on its own just isn't much of a structural material, it behaves more like glue than wire. What saved that build was sucking the cracked beads off with a bit of wick and running thin bus wire on the underside instead, tacked down at every third pad or so. It took less solder, went faster, and I could lift the board without holding my breath. These days I'll only use the bead method for jumps of one or two pads where a wire would get in the way. For anything longer the wire underneath wins for me, even if it doesn't look as pretty on the component side. Your meter check habit is the part I'd keep either way, that's what actually got my mixer working on the first power up.

Tried this on a little blinking decoration project and the part that got me was fixing mistakes. You can't just reheat a bead and move it, it wants to stay put. Ended up going over the bad run with desoldering wick to pull most of it off, then redoing that section clean. Worked okay but the pad looked rough after.

Now I only use this method for builds I'm confident about. Anything with more than a handful of connections goes on stripboard instead, half the tracing is allready done for you and the rows are easier to eyeball.

This thread is making me feel better about a mess I made last month. I was modifying an old battery charger circuit on stripboard and tried stretching a bead across like six holes and it went everywhere, gave up and used the copper tracks instead. Kind of wondered if my iron was just too weak for it. Do you guys worry about how much current a plain bead can carry? My project was only milliamps but I'd be nervous feeding anything beefier through one.