Few comments, please ignore if you've heard it/them already.

1.  I'd invest in a "proper" wire-wrap stripper such as those made by CK in
Germany (mine for 30 AWG = 0.25mm is part number 3756).  The built-in
stripper in the 3-in-one tool gets irksome when doing a lot of wrapping.
Proper tool also makes it easy to get the length of stripped wire absolutely
right.

2.  When wrapping a daisy chain connection such as a data bus or clock line,
don't go a>b, b>c, c>d etc.  Go a>b, c>d, e>f etc THEN b>c, d>e etc.  Reason
is that you may want to change the connections, and if it's early in the
daisy chain, you have to unwrap the whole lot.  Sometimes an unwrapped wire
can be re-wrapped, but it won't provide a RELIABLE connection.  This
matters, since a good wire-wrap connection is very good, certainly better
than single-sided PCB.  One guy here one time wrote a program to sort a
netlist to give this coherent two-level wrap.  When used with our
long-obsolete PCB layout program to get a good placement, meant that boards
were wrapped a lot faster than the 30 wraps/hour quoted in this list by
someone who once did it for a living.  I suspect reason is that most of the
time is taken identifying unambiguously the two pins to be wrapped, and/or
checking the work with a continuity tester - actually doing the stripping
and wrapping is a matter of seconds.

3.  If you're going to do any significant amount of wrapping (or for
sustained periods), I'd advise shelling out the megabucks for a powered
cut-strip-wrap tool.  The heads on these things cost over 200 UKpound, but
they make life very easy.  (The heads are easily damaged by inexperienced
users.)  Main problem with a powered tool is that it works by tension, so
the wrapped board has a tendency to come out of the assembly frame with a
pronounced curvature!  There are ways round this, which I won't bore you
with, especially as any engineer or technician can work out their own.

4.  Just because a design works on wire-wrap, doesn't mean it will work on
PCB!  Since wire-wrap is essentially point-to-point, and the connections are
often at almost random orientations (and certainly with no sharp corners
except at pins), the high-frequency characteristics are totally different to
those of a PCB.  A PCB may suffer much more crosstalk and interference, and
there may be signal skews that were absent on the wire wrap board.
Wire-wrapping is perfectly capable of functioning correctly for years, so
only change to PCB if quantity or other considerations such as space dictate.

5.  Surface mount and wire-wrap CAN go together.  It is most unfortunate
that Vero stopped making a wonderful system that allowed you to put together
what amounted to custom wire-wrap surface mount footprints for PLCC
packages.  However, there are still lots of companies out there making
megabucks selling transition connectors/sockets/adaptors.

6.  A previous comment said don't waste two colours just on Vcc and Gnd -
omitting to mention that most prototyping boards provide a Vcc/Gnd grid that
you link the sockets to with Z links (so called because they are more or
less that shape - you drop them over power pins and solder in place before
starting wrapping).  It's also a good idea to solder a decoupler between the
power pins at this stage - adding after wrapping is not easy, unless you
aren't bothered about getting the capacitor closely connected to the IC
pins, in which case why bother at all?  Z links should not be used to
connect pins such as chip selects and output enables to power - you may want
to change a permanent enable to controlled enable!

7.  It's easy to implement a "branching star" connection scheme in
wire-wrap, and this may be very useful for analogue signals and to minimise
clock skew.  Just watch out for the wrapping strategy as per comment 2
should there be any possibility you might want to modify the net.

8.  An undocumented wire-wrap, or worse, a documented wire-wrap that's been
modified in unrecorded ways, is an absolute nightmare to reverse-engineer
for the actual netlist.  It's the sort of mistake lots of people make - once.

That wraps up my 2p worth.  Sorry folks, couldn't resist.

Tim Forcer            Tel: (+44) (0)1703 593362
                      Fax: (+44) (0)1703 592053
                    email:  tmf@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Department of Electronics & Computer Science
Room 3005, Building 35
The University, Southampton, SO17 1BJ     UK