icpadtool

IC Pad Tool

Landing Pads For ICs or IC Sockets Make Ugly Construction Almost Fun

With a few scraps of wood or fiberboard you can build your own tool for making IC Pads for your Manhattan or Ugly-Construction projects.

Start with a base section that is about 3 inches by 4 inches (about 7 cm X 10 cm). Make two more sections that are 1 inch (3 cm) wide with one being 3 inches (7 cm) long and the other being 1 inch (3 cm) long. The drawing at the right shows how.

Glue the two strips on top of the base plate and aligned with one edge. Make sure you have a space between then for inserting a narrow saw blade. This guide will hold your saw aligned for cutting slots in the PCB copper layer.

After allowing the glue to cure overnight, you can drill a row of small holes (use your favourite small diameter PCB drill) about 1/4 inch (7 mm) ahead of the guide blocks. Here I used a scrap of perf-board with 0.1 inch hole spacing as the drill guide. Push-pins are used to hold the perf-board in place once some initial holes are drilled. You can see the saw slot in the background behind the blue push-pin.

The photo on the right is the guide for cutting slots in the copper coating on 1/2 inch (1.5 cm) wide sections of PCB material. The PCB strips are held against the guide while a thin saw is guided by the slot in those guide blocks to cut away the copper with precise spacing between slots. The push-pins are moved sideways one hole at a time to control the width of each slot.

Once a strip of PCB material has been slotted, you need to cut it to length for the IC you are going to use (7 slots for 14 pin ICs, etc.). Then rotate this small section by 90 degrees and use your PCB slotting tool to separate the slots into 2 rows. That makes a 14 pin IC pad that is ready for gluing down to the substrate of your next Ugly Construction electronics project.

You can use a conventional thin-bladed metal cutting saw to cut the slots. However, I got carried away and built my own special saw just for this purpose. The saw I use was manufactured from a metal cutting saw blade (a Hack Saw in US terminology). A length of 3/4 inch dowel was slotted with the same saw blade and turned to just over 1/2 inch OD on a wood turning lathe. The saw blade was inserted in the slot, and a short section of 1/2 inch ID brass tubing (Copper water pipe) forced over the small end of the dowel to act as a ferule and to hold the saw blade in place.

Using Push-Pins to hold Perf-Board drilling template in place

Guide holes are now drilled and the cutting guide is done

Using a Push-Pin to set slot position and cutting the slots

Cut IC pad to size, rotate it 90 degrees and separate sides by cutting one more slot at right angles to the others

Here you have a slotted strip and one that has been made into an IC Pad, ready for gluing down to substrate in your next Ugly Construction project. You can solder the ICs directly to the pad, or solder down an IC socket and insert your ICs in it.

A couple views of an IC Landing Pad which was

built using this tool.