Wire-wrap question

Thread Starter

autorelease

Joined Jan 26, 2009
39
I'm not sure how many people use wire-wrap anymore, but I experimented with it yesterday and I quite like it. I have one question: How do you connect a wire-wrap post to a discrete component like a resistor? Can you just wrap onto the lead? It doesn't seem like that would be the best idea, since leads are thin and too easily bent by accident.
 

beenthere

Joined Apr 20, 2004
15,819
The "right" way to do it is to solder the resistor to a component mounting pad, which in turn insets into a wire wrap socket. If you want to wrap right onto the leads, solder the connection for reliability.
 

DonQ

Joined May 6, 2009
321
I've been using wire-wrap for a long time, including some fairly major systems. You don't have to convince me! When I see people soldering wires onto perf-boards to make prototype systems, I just laugh! I can go at least 5 times as fast, probably twice as dense, and corrections, although never much fun, aren't like having to unsolder a bunch of stuff. Everybody doesn't use this stuff??? Go figure!

For the little 1/8 and 1/4 watt resistors, I just use machined pin wire-wrap sockets, like the ones for IC chips. Make sure you use "machined pin" or the connection won't be good. You can pull the pins out of the bottom of a socket, or just use them still in the socket. 0.3" is about the spacing you need when you bend the leads on a 1/8W resistor. 1/4 watt takes a little inward wiggle on the leads. You can also just bend one lead back parallel to the resistor body and them place the leads in adjacent 0.1" spacing on one side of the socket, or cut the socket in half to use it. You can also buy machine pins in single rows in groups of 50. You can really get lots of components in a small area this way. I keep a lot of them around since I use so many of them. You can just snap them off to the number you need to use. Little capacitors and signal diodes can fit in these also

The other way is to get little clips, called T49, from someplace like Digi-key. These are good for large resistors, like 1/2 watt or greater, or big capacitors or power diodes.

Just wrapping around the round leads of a component doesn't use the strength of the wire-wrap method. It depends on the wire compressing as it goes around the corners of the square peg. If you wrap around a round wire, you have to solder it also. But then, unwrapping to make a circuit correction is a real pain! It start to be as bad as the regular solder method.
 
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