At 08:23 AM 7/18/2009, Olin Lathrop wrote: >As for vias, you can consider most holes for thru hole leads as a via >opportunity by soldering both on the top and the bottom of the board. >Unfortunatly this doesn't work for DIP sockets since the top ends of the >pins are not accessible. One time I used wire wrap sockets just to get the >long leads. All the DIP sockets were then up off the board so that I could >get at the top end of the pins. It looked silly but it worked. We use machine-pin DIP sockets for exactly that reason - the bottom of the pins extends well below the plastic that holds the pins in place. That makes it easy to solder the top-side pads that need soldering. I mentioned that we used to make our own PCBs for the products we were selling (early '80's) - volumes were too small for the board houses and AP Circuits didn't exist back then. Making sure that we soldered ALL of the needed top-side pads under the DIP sockets was a problem for a while. What we did to solve it was mask off all of the top-side pads that did not have traces going to them - that made it easy to ensure that all top-side solder joints were soldered. If it had a pad, it needed to be soldered. Easy! dwayne -- Dwayne Reid Trinity Electronics Systems Ltd Edmonton, AB, CANADA (780) 489-3199 voice (780) 487-6397 fax www.trinity-electronics.com Custom Electronics Design and Manufacturing -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist