Workbench Cleverness

[billstein]

The cake holder..... It keeps away mosquitos BUT.....

Doesn't it also trap the paint fumes in as well and thus causes the drying time to be significantly longer?

Hey,
Not really, only if u really close it fully!
I also turn the top part 90• to let some of the remaining solvent evaporate! A slow film formation is anyways not so bad. It helps for an even coat and avoid orange skin formation. I leave it there for 20 min, than in the toast oven for more 20 min at 50•C

I do the same thing, using a small plastic storage container. I've never had any problem with paints drying. I do the same thing when I pour envirotex. Hate it when you go through this whole process and then have some weird flying thing land on your creation.

[rullywowr]

I went to Home Depot and built a powder coating rig as Cody suggested. Tie plates, 1/4-20 nuts and bolts. Works awesome!  It even makes great electrical contact for the ground wire to the powder coating rig. Here's a pic of its maiden voyage. Thanks Cody!

[selfdestroyer]

Right on Ben, looks great, my father-in-law will love the feedback. I'll make sure to tell him tomorrow.

Cody

[Leevibe]

I hope it's not too annoying bumping this thread again.

I built me a test rig and I wanted to share it. It's pretty much Jacob's rig with signal probe.

The case is a powder coat fail that's been sitting around waiting to be used.

I used 6' of cat6 cable for my wire. It's handy because it gives you 8 leads to play with in a cable the diameter of a guitar cable. The length allows me to put my guitar ins/outs along with a stomp switch down on the floor while I work with the circuit up on the bench.

The toggle is for switching between the LED mounted in the box or connecting to a board mounted LED. Not super useful but kind of neat.

I bought the test clips off Amazon, 10 for $6. these are the ones I bought. I like them much more than alligator clips because I can easily hook them to component leads and they stay put.

I'm going to replace the test leads with the most flexible stranded wire I can find. The cat6 wire I have is solid and it won't hold up long in this application. I'll probably scavenge some old ear buds or something for that.

I was nervous that running 6' of unshielded wire to and from the circuit board would give me noise or hum issues but it's dead quiet. If I hook the in/out clips together, I don't hear any sound difference.

Now what to do with those two extra wires?

[rullywowr]

Wow lee, that looks great! Super clean and the test probes are nice. 

[peAk]

Can't wait to check this out when I get home. My company filters most pics and unfortunately can't see these until I get home.

This will be inspiring because I just got all my stuff to build my test rig and I am going to do a hybrid of the Beavis & Jacob Test Rig. Will be using some of the connectors that you turned me onto as well.

[Leevibe]

Can't wait to check this out when I get home. My company filters most pics and unfortunately can't see these until I get home.

This will be inspiring because I just got all my stuff to build my test rig and I am going to do a hybrid of the Beavis & Jacob Test Rig. Will be using some of the connectors that you turned me onto as well.

They're a little on the cheapo side but they work just fine. I think you're going to love them.

[peAk]

Can't wait to check this out when I get home. My company filters most pics and unfortunately can't see these until I get home.

This will be inspiring because I just got all my stuff to build my test rig and I am going to do a hybrid of the Beavis & Jacob Test Rig. Will be using some of the connectors that you turned me onto as well.

They're a little on the cheapo side but they work just fine. I think you're going to love them.

Yeah, they seemed a little wimpy but fine. I have been meaning to ask you how you grab stuff with them that isn't on the edge of the PCB?

[Leevibe]

Yeah, they seemed a little wimpy but fine. I have been meaning to ask you how you grab stuff with them that isn't on the edge of the PCB?

You just grab right onto the exposed part of a component lead from the top side of the board. I can take a pic if it still doesn't make sense. If you need to connect to a solder pad, just trace the pad to the nearest component and grab its leg or you could shove a bit of clipped component lead through the pad and clip to it. You would want to bend the end so it wouldn't pop out. Bend on one end, clip on the other. Or you could put a little blu-tack to hold it in!

[Leevibe]

OK Justin. I did a little experimenting and came up with a couple cool tricks to give you access to where you need to grab on the board.

The first pic shows the normal way you would use one of these clips. Just grabbing the leg of a resistor:






The next pic shows what you might do if you wanted access to the solder pad of a component or wire that wasn't loaded yet. You could use this method for subbing in different values until you find what you want for example. I just took a 2" piece of solid core wire and stripped a bit off the end and shoved it through the pad. The insulation on the wire holds it from the back side and the pincers of the test clip hold it from the top. The wire itself just needs to be a big enough gauge to make solid contact with the hole plating. The wire itself isn't connected to anything. It's just a handy way to anchor the clip to the pad.






But what if you need to connect to a pad with a large hole size that a wire's insulation would slip through? Just reach right through the pad with the pincers and grab onto something on the back side. In this case I just used the same piece of wire, but I think you could even use a stripped piece of insulation and insure that you don't accidentally create a short. I haven't tried this in actual practice but I think the pincers would make contact against the edge of the pad well enough for testing purposes.

[muddyfox]

Hey great stuff!

[peAk]

Finally made it home

Great stuff Lee! I am definitely going this route. The thing I will also do is have the breadboard like the Beavis Board so I can experiment and try and learn more about the circuits. The Cat6 was a great idea and kept things clean. I also like your suggestions with the clamps.

Hopefully I will have time to put something together this weekend.

Again, thanks for the tips and keep em coming. I can speak for everyone but I love them.

[Leevibe]

OK, I updated my rig a little bit. I went to Goodwill and found some RCA cables that were really flexible so I cut it up into a bunch of 1' lengths and spliced them in to the end of my cable. Now it's really easy to work with and I don't worry about the leads breaking.

I also discovered that my rig makes a great LED tester. Since I have a CLR mounted in series with the LED clip, all I have to do is hook 9v clip to anode and LED clip to cathode to verify LEDs before boxing.

[Stomptown]

Very cool!

[jighead81]

Got some cardboard and tape and went crazy. I couldn't find any bins around okc that I thought would work