Building boards

[jglloyd]

With all of the discussion that goes on here, you guys must build a ton of 
circuit boards and surely you build some of them by hand. Are there any 
prototyping boards that you guys prefer? Any special techniques that you use?

Right now, I'm building a board with 4 stereo DACs and the associated filter 
circuitry. In the past, I've used cheap proto boards with a ground plane on 
one side and pad-per-hole on the other side. These worked great for me but my 
source has dried up. This time I went out and paid big money for a large 
Tanner board. It has pads on each hole but it also has a plane on each side. 
This should give a fantastic ground plane. I'm planning on cutting away the 
plane with an Exacto (sp?) knife around my components and circuit runs on one 
side of the board. This could get tedious, so I'm also considering using a 
Dremel tool to cut away the plane.

Have any of you used surface mount components? I'm thinking that it might be 
easier to use surface mount resistors and capacitors since they fit exactly 
between two pads. This would eliminate a lot of hand wiring since the discrete 
components could simply be strung together, end to end.

Do you use IC sockets for you analog components or do you solder directly to 
them?

Any ideas or comments would be greatly appreciated.
Jon