Tuesday, June 24, 2008
What's the best way to cleanly divide header strips?
The guy in my local electronics shop recommended that I just press in the notch with a knife. I tried it but wasn't able to snap them this way.
So I used a chisel and hammer. Which snapped them in the correct place, but a few times the casing to one of the sides of the break was damaged, sometimes losing a pin.
So what's a reliable way to cleanly break header strips like this into the lengths that you need?
Meanwhile, at Owen's suggestion I'm twisting wires together like this as a way of attaching two of them to a single via hole in the button pad PCBs (one wire is a jumper connecting the PCB to another one, the second wire leads to one of the shift registers or the max LED driver chip).
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4 comments:
I've had good results using side cutters.
Thanks. I had tried diagonal cutters (the same thing i guess?) before, but also managed to damage the pin casings.
To be honest, I usually do it with my hands... Index and thumb where I want to split, hold it firmly...
Maybe thats a little brute force though!
However, when I needed to separate individual headers, I used a wire cutter which worked pretty well.
Jordan
How about using a hot knife from digikey. Looks like an exacto knife with a soldering iron handle attached. Somewhat expensive, but it might do a better job.
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