[sdiy] PCB layout mistake = Aaron curls up in a ball in the corner and cries

[Aaron Lanterman]

Feeling overly confident from the success of my Music Easel LPG layout  
(youtube video to come when I get around to it), I was really excited  
when five new boards (preamp & env det, pulser, envelope generator,  
timbre circuit, and balanced modulator) came from PCBCART last week,  
and I happily built, built, and built. I need to order a few strange  
resistor values and various pots, but I'm close to being able to start  
testing everything.

Then, while viewing the schematic of the timber generator, I realized  
to my horror that I had the +/- on four op amps switched. The feedback  
was going the wrong direction. How could I have not seen that before  
in all the time I've spent staring at the schematic? Hmm, I'll need 8  
jumper wires to fix that. Bad, but still doable.

Then I reviewed the others. The pulser, envelope generator, and preamp  
& envelope detector have op amp inputs OK. But on the balanced mod -  
oh hell, I screwed up the inputs of 11 of the 12 op amps. Aaack, that  
would require 22 jumper wires! *hits head repeatedly into wall*

What makes it worse is I have a vague recollection of actually  
switching the op amps from the correct way to the wrong way at some  
point in a severe brain fart moment.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARG!

That's a couple hundred down the drain.

I figured it out before I started testing, but I still have most of  
the parts in. My plan is to solder in the vactrols with only a few  
leads in, so I can clip them back out and reuse them (I can't imaging  
committing 7 expensive vactrols to a board that requires 22 jumper  
wires, which I can't imaging are very stable).

But I do want to try to test everything, so that when I fix the op  
amps I can fix other mistakes I find to.

So what's the best approach to actually getting a prototype running?

1) I was thinking of dremelling the traces, but then I thought a  
quicker solution would be to just clip the input leads on the ICs  
where the ICs meet the board.

2) If I take approach 1, is there a "best practices" for soldering  
jumper wires on top of ICs? I imaging it will be hard to make a stable  
connection

3) Instead of 1 and 2, maybe I should unsolder the op amps (I  
generally solder chips straight into the board without sockets, unless  
it's a particularly expensive chip to replace, or failure prone like  
CMOS), put in sockets, and build some "pin switchers?"

- Aaron