Doing a little wire wrap and while searching for the wrap-id labels came across this video. As a bonus the video is from Bill Herd of Commodore fame and he shows some ‘prototypes’ from those days while explaining the process. Wire wrap is still a great way to prototype digital circuits.
It has been a long time since I did any wire wrap stuff. My mom used to do lots of wirewrap and soldering assembly work while working at Collins Radio back in the 70’s. I still use some of her tools from back then.
Plan on doing a project on a “bed of nails” brd. Brings back really fond memories.
Probably faster than doing a one off pcb - unless your parts are restricted surface mount…
The main use i have for wire wrap these days is that a spool of 30 ga wire and a wire wrap tool means you have thousands of jumpers at your disposal if a pcb or computer card is missing a configuration jumper.
I would rather pay extra money for a multi layer pcb and save hours of needless labor wire wrapping.
Not to mention troubleshooting the extra crosstalk issues that result from wire wrap.
Its easy to forget that a wire is also an antenna until you learn at the university of hard knocks.
Stuff you learn there is hard to forget.
But if you want to do it let me know and I will dig trough my stuff and give you some wire wrap tools.
Cheers
Steve
Creating PCB’s are not a beginner skill, nor a very good technique for most prototyping. However, even a novice can learn to wire wrap in a few minutes. It is a great technique for prototypes and even permanent one off projects.
