RG Keen Neutron PCB Question...

Stompboxes circuits published in magazines, books or on DIY electronics websites.
Post Reply
User avatar
chicago_mike
Tube Twister
Information
Posts: 1754
Joined: 03 Jul 2008, 04:38
Has thanked: 22 times
Been thanked: 316 times

Post by chicago_mike »

I may have posted this before but My searching sucks soo...

I made 2 neutron pcb's but they seemed really small. I did do a 1 to 1 ratio when I printed them so I thought I was okay.

But I now noticed that the holes for many parts are way to close together for regular sized parts like the caps and opamps. Not to mention if I am going to use vactrols..

So my question to anybody who built this, is this supposed to be a very small board? All of RG's boards look very small comared to GG or tonepad or others..Are there smaller parts that are NOT surface mount that I might be aware of?

Again, I made sure to do a 1 to 1 ratio print, and my laser printer is a very nice color Brother laser printer so, I thinnk or thought I was doing this right.

I want to build a few but I dont want to sit there and play with resizing this thing to get it right. I am making a lovetone clona and that too seemed a little small but everything is fitting...

Any help and what ratio should I try would be greatly appreciated! :)
Skyline FX 2013

User avatar
Hobie
Information
Posts: 24
Joined: 13 Nov 2007, 12:39

Post by Hobie »

i've had some trouble in the past with printing other people's layouts too. The solution for me is usually just trail and error. I print out the design on a couple of normal sheets of paper and compare the holes with components that i have lying around. What works best for me is using an opamp socket as a reference. or if the there is no opamp on the board and the board was made with something like diy layout creator than i check if the holes that are spaced closest on the board are 2.54 mm apart. Or if all else fails i just check with the datasheet of a part that's used on the layout and i check the dimensions there and then use that as a reference.

but usually i just look for pdf files of layouts because they preserve the aspect ratio the best.

good luck,

Thomas

User avatar
R.G.
Resistor Ronker
Information
Posts: 337
Joined: 22 Sep 2007, 02:24
Been thanked: 39 times

Post by R.G. »

chicago_mike wrote: So my question to anybody who built this, is this supposed to be a very small board? All of RG's boards look very small comared to GG or tonepad or others..Are there smaller parts that are NOT surface mount that I might be aware of?

Again, I made sure to do a 1 to 1 ratio print, and my laser printer is a very nice color Brother laser printer so, I thinnk or thought I was doing this right.

I want to build a few but I dont want to sit there and play with resizing this thing to get it right. I am making a lovetone clona and that too seemed a little small but everything is fitting...

Any help and what ratio should I try would be greatly appreciated! :)
All of R.G.'s boards are intended for normal sized components. I asked him instead of posting on some forums, and he told me.

Printers and printing is not an exact one-to-one solution. Each printer/program may do it a bit differently. As noted, PDF is much better about this than other solutions, and that's why I went to PDF for my layouts years ago. But even PDF is not perfect and the printer itself may scale it a bit in either X or Y or both.

What you do is to print one on paper, then adjust your X and Y scaling until things come out the correct size, then print on your photo film or PNP.

On all of my layouts, the width between 1/4W resistor leads is 0.400" if you can't find an IC pattern, like on the Neovibe. On the Neutron, proper scaling is when the distance between pin 1 and pin 4 on a DIP-8 package is 0.300" and the distance between pin 1 and pin 8 is also 0.300".

Mess with it on paper, get the scale right, then go print to your expensive medium.

Post Reply