I finally got my usb board to work, unfortunately I had to resort to ~45 jumper links per board (the other option was a four-layer board, since the usb traces need a solid groud plane above them).

I used the links that are in eagle libraries, so they are in 15,20 and 25mm lengths. Does any shop sell pre-bent wires in such lengths? I haven't yet seen one..

So assuming I can't get them from a shop, do you guys have some clever way to make them efficiently in not so small quantities? I already bought a tinned copper wire, but bending it with a tweezer to the correct lenght is not a very fun job. Any ideas for some gadget that might making them easier? I will be making 8 boards, so that is bending and cutting 360 links

 

Seems I had to say it out loud, because I already got an idea
I could cut a pice of stripboard, glue all but one hole, stick the wire in the hole and bend it around the edge of the board. That might give me almost right angle bends.

Any other ideas? I remeber that once I saw a plastic piece meant for straghtening of DIP pins that might work, but this was a long time ago and the shop is long gone.

 

Googling "Preformed jumper wires" yields a few hits... Fancort would be who I would contact first.. Squires Electronics has some too.. (website is horrible though and as such I would NOT buy from them ever because of that)
Of course I would have chosen the 4 layer board as the added cost for the extra layer is probably cheaper than the labor involved to install 45 jumper wires..

There are also 0 ohm resistors meant for that too.. If you have an axial resistor former that might be a cheaper option..

 

I couldn't find anything suitable on farnell, which is here the main big supplier. Maybe I could find something if I googled enough, but it would probably take ages to ship and I need to test the populated prototype tomorrow.

Anyway, with two layers of stripboard stacked together to get the correct length of the jumpers, the 35 jumpers took me to bend & cut, place and solder just over 30 minutes. This is about quarter the additional cost of going 4 layer, but the main difference is that it is me who gets paid more and not the pcb manufacturer

 

For some reason I assumed you were making/selling a bunch of these boards. If so a multilayer board is MUCH cheaper than your 30 minutes of labor..

 

What I am making is a testing rig for USB modems for a company that makes the installers inside the modem and needs to test different simcards against each modem.
So I will be making more than one of these boards in the end, but I am fairly sure it will be less than 15 boards. Of course if I was making hundreds of them I would be very tempted to go multilayer.