Thursday, October 17, 2013

Electronic Component Lead Bending Tool

IMAG0704.jpgWhen assembling a circuit it is pretty common to hook up a resistor or other component to span a distance on your board. This is true with PCB builds, but especially with perfboards. In order to get a clean, well built looking final product it is important to size the leads for these resistors so that they fit flush with the board and do not have excess lead slack. This can a tricky to do by hand and can easily lead to kinked up leads. Instead you can make one of the simple lean bending tools and make the bends perfect every time!IMAG0700.jpgGet a piece of scrap perfboard, stripboard, or whatever. All that matters is that the board be drilled with the normal 0.1" spaced holes. Take a marker and put a dot on the holes you plan to use. I suggest a slope of 1/3 as I have shown here. In other words, pick the first place you want to measure a resistor, probably 4 or 5 holes, then move over three and up one. Make a mark on that spot and kept moving over 3 and up 1, marking holes, until you reach the longest bend you will ever want to make. Once you have the desired holes marked, connect them with a line.

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