Miscellaneous Good Ideas

Stuck Allen screws with stripped sockets

This tip comes from Tom, N0JMY: "I recently had good luck with mixing up a little J-B Weld and putting a tiny dab on an Allen wrench which I then stuck in the rounded out hole of the set-screw. Propped it up and held it more or less centered with some electrician's tape for a few hours. It got a good enough bite to back the screw out. I've done that with i.f. transformer slugs, too."

Homebrew "SurfBoards" for BF998 Dual-gate MOSFETs

This great idea is from John Russel of Davenport, Iowa, soon to be a ham. BF998 dual-gate MOSFETS are readily available and inexpensive; see Wes, W7ZOI's web site regarding some samples offered by Bob, KE6F (I did, and I got a bunch!). The issue, of course is that they are small surface mount parts in an SOT143 package, about 3mm long by 2.5 mm wide, including their leads (two on each side). John has come up with a way to pre-mount them for Ugly, Manhattan, or even through-hole (!) construction. Here are John's comments:

"What I've been doing with them is take my dremel with a cutoff wheel and make a bunch of 'X's on some PCB scraps and then I take my manhattan pad punch but use the next size larger punch than normal, center it on the 'X' and punch it out ... This leaves me a pad with the copper cut into 4 slices and I mount the MOSFET on it .... I usually make up 10-12 at a time and when I need a dual gate MOSFET all I have to do is glue the MOSFET/pad combination to the PCB and build off of it .... I store them in one of those plastic boxes you get samples in and sandwich them between two pieces of antistatic foam .... I even took one, added four legs from old component leads and dropped it into a circuit that had a blown 3N211..."