[sdiy] Wiring pencil

[Ingo Debus]

Am 13.07.2008 um 11:54 schrieb Andre Majorel:

> - Do you have to use the combs ? They're for 1.02 mm holes and my
>   vector board stock has smaller holes (around 0.8 mm).

Not necessarily if there aren't too many wires. The more wires there  
are on the board the higher is the chance that wires get into your  
way when soldering.
On the other hand, if you use combs you get bundles of wire and  
capacitive coupling.


> - Once you have soldered one end and "drawn" the wire to the other
>   end, what do you do ? You'd need three hands to hold the pencil,
>   the iron and the solder. Do you cut the wire to length and hope
>   it stays put ?

If you wind one or two windings tightly around a component wire or IC  
socket pin usually the wire stays put until it's soldered. You only  
save time if you don't change the tool all the time. So you first  
tighten the wire at all soldering points and then do all the soldering.
Say, you want to wire a parallel bus, connecting A1 to B1, A2 to B2  
and so on. Typically you would start at A1 go from there to B1, from  
there to B2, then back to A2, then to A3 and so on. After doing all  
connections you would do the soldering. In a last step you cut the  
connections B1-B2, A2-A3 and so on with a sharp knife. This way you  
can wire a bus pretty fast.


> - The wire is awfully thin. 0.15 mm outer diameter including 0.012
>   mm thick insulation = 0.0125 mm² ! Couldn't that cause problems
>   for analogue synth-DIY ? The resistance is given at about 1 ohm/m
>   so the average connection will be a few tens milliohms.

I never use Verowire for analog circuits, and never for any power  
supply connections. Even for digital circuit I don't use it often.  
It's so flimsy and you never know how good the insulation still is  
after doing several attempts of making a solder joint (you have to  
heat the solder joint for quite a while until the insulation melts).  
The fumes of the molten insulation stuff sure aren't healthy too. But  
for bus wiring (multi-digit seven-segment display for instance) it's  
hard to beat.

Ingo