Build Your Own Clone Message Board

when soldering the diodes in place i noticed 2 spots where the holes are very close together. especially a spot one the right of the board where there are 2 x 1N4148 or 1N914 's right next together.

my question is when i solder them, is it crucial that the solder does not touch or is it okay if a little bit connects. its a tight spot and i'm having difficulty keeping it separate.

It depends. Those diodes you mention are for signal clipping and are already connected in parallel, head-to-tail, so in that case it makes no difference if the adjacent solder joints run together. Usually, if two eyelets are so close together that it's difficult to keep them from connecting, it's because they're already connected with the board tracing. If you hold the board up with a bright back-light, you can generally see the tracing between eyelets quite easily.

Probably the most common occurrence of adjacent eyelets being close when they shouldn't connect is for electrolytic caps. But it's pretty easy to keep the solder from bridging between the two joints unless your soldering technique is very poor or you're using too large of a tip on your iron.

so ideally i dont want shit ton of solder bunging up the back of the board. i just got a new iron to replace the one i was using. gonna go back and clean up a few joints.

thanks!

Hi. This is my first build. I hate to hi-jack an old post, but I'm running into this same issue with the triangle beaver and understand about the head-to-tail alignment, but I seem to have soldered connections on both ends (head-to-tail AND tail-to-head, in a loop). Should this concern me? I see you saying that these are parallel, so it sounds like I'm OK. Just want to be sure before I blow this build.

By the way, short of getting my eyes right on the resistor color bands (thank God I have a good multimeter), this build has been a blast. Thanks BYOC! I'll be sure to post pics when I'm done.

Thad

You are indeed OK. That's how clipping diode pairs work--connected head to tail at both ends. Because an audio signal is AC--a sine wave that goes positive and negative--one diode clips the ascending signal while the one of opposite polarity clips the descending signal.