Diameter of breadboard holes incompatible with size of components pins and jumper wires etc.

upand_at_them said:

All of the ones that I have from a name brand manufacturer (like Vishay) have tinned copper leads, as stated in the datasheet. And the leads have proper thickness. Steel/iron leads *are* cheap Chinese ones, distributed by many vendors.

Click to expand...

What size resistors do you buy then? - the Vishay 0.6W ones I use have thin steel wires, why would you want thick wires on a small resistor?. There's also no mention of copper wires (or indeed steel ones) in the datasheet, but they stick to magnets. RS Pro resistors don't mention what the wires are in the datasheet either, but TE Connectivity claim to be copper wires.

Mostly I buy Vishay or TE Connectivity, or RS Pro if those aren't available - as far as I've noticed, every wire sticks to a slightly magnetised screwdriver, and it's really annoying

I'll have to see if I can locate any TE Connectivity ones, but they may be out of packets and in drawers/boxes.

Here's one of the Vishay datasheets:

The TE Connectivity datasheet says the same thing..."tinned copper leads".

Purchased from Digi-Key.

Nigel Goodwin said:

What size resistors do you buy then? - the Vishay 0.6W ones I use have thin steel wires, why would you want thick wires on a small resistor?. There's also no mention of copper wires (or indeed steel ones) in the datasheet, but they stick to magnets. RS Pro resistors don't mention what the wires are in the datasheet either, but TE Connectivity claim to be copper wires.

Mostly I buy Vishay or TE Connectivity, or RS Pro if those aren't available - as far as I've noticed, every wire sticks to a slightly magnetised screwdriver, and it's really annoying

I'll have to see if I can locate any TE Connectivity ones, but they may be out of packets and in drawers/boxes.

Click to expand...

1/4W resistors all have tiny wires. Solder coat wires they get larger.

upand_at_them said:

Steel/iron leads *are* cheap Chinese ones, distributed by many vendors.

Click to expand...

Sounds like you're related to AG?

Breadboard are used by students who guess about a circuit design. The connections are frequently intermittent. The many long wires all over the place make seeing what connects to what very difficult. The rows of contacts and wires are antennas that pickup interference.

Veroboard is a British brand of stripboard. It is a circuit board with parallel strips of copper that are perforated.
A stripboard circuit uses the parts and a few short jumper wires all soldered to make a pcb. The strips are cut with a tool or with a drill bit so that each strip can be used for many short wires of a circuit.

I design circuits using datasheets then simple calculations and almost all of my stripboard circuits worked perfectly the first time they are powered. If a part needs to be replaced then it is easy to slurp away the solder and replace it.
I have made thousands of stripboard circuits as prototypes and most were sold as the final product.

The only solderless breadboards I've had unquestioned success with, and no reliability issues whatsoever, are made by 3M, and the product is named "3M Terminal Strip". One can occasionally find them on eBay for cheaper than they cost new from DigiKey or Mouser. They have been around on the market for 4 decades at the very least, and are a product well worth the price. If you don't outright melt them, they should last a lifetime. In my experience - they do.

Another problem is that the most popular breadboard jumper wires are #24 / AWG24. That's too thin to be practical. And most of the sellers have no clue what's important and just don't specify the wire gage. It's usually correct to assume that if a jumper wire assortment doesn't specify the wire gage, it's the cheap #24 stuff.

If you don't want to curse a whole lot, you need #22 / AWG22 jumpers. ELENCO sells a kit of those. Not as affordable as the crap #24, but worth the cost.

Of course 3M sells the #22 jumpers too, just in packages that are not very affordable nor amateur-oriented. Great quality jumpers for professional use, though. They do come up in lots on eBay sometimes.

The breadboards that look exactly like the one you show are unquestionably junk. They all seem to come from one or very few factories, are made on similar or identical tooling, and are so flimsy that it's usually a waste of time to mess with them.

The distinguishing characteristic is a rather milky whitish plastic body. It's not a very bright white. 3M breadboards have a very solid looking white body, and the only legend color is white. The legend is only row letters and column numbers, no other black markings.

The plastic body in the 3M product has a higher melting point than that of the junk ones. The contacts are also stiffer and don't plastically deform in normal use. It's extremely easy to mechanically damage/deform the contacts in the cheap solderless breadboards, without even trying. The only way I ever managed to mangle the ones in 3M breadboards was to push leads with solder on them into the holes. Even then, the contacts would still work, just not have as much contact force when used with thinner wires.

I'm not related to 3M or their sales channels in any shape or form - I've just been a user of those 3M solderless breadboards since I was a kid in the 80s. They were just as solid a product then as they are now.

Vero Board (style) is also my favorite for one-offs.
Incidentally I checked a selection of my resistor stock, and they all showed tin plated copper wire.
The last were from Digikey.

Breadboads are used for "trial and error" and error and error and error and error and error and error and error and error.......