I recently fabricated a pcb. Here is a layout of my board. It is a double sided board. Blue lines are bottom and red lines are top, pads (green) are both bottom and top.
My problem is the top trace. See, I use IC sockets to solder into the board. But since the socket have short legs, I cant solder those legs to the top traces. What should I do? I'm thinking to solder the IC's to the board directly, but won't soldering destroy them? The are just a bunch of 74xx gates. Thanks!
ICs are made to handle solder. I don't understand how or why the leads on your sockets are too short but you can easily top side solder them as long as your board has plated through holes to connect the layers.
If the holes are plated-through, you don't need to solder on top, just the bottom.
If not, then you will need to solder the ICs directly to the board. Just be sure you use a controlled temperature soldering iron so you don't overheat the chips.
I strip the insulation of some stranded wire and use the individual strands (30 AWG), bend a 1/16", 90 deg angle and feed the strand through the hole, than solder to the top of the pad. Insert socket and solder pin and wire on the bottom. A bit fiddely. Alternately you could find wire-wrap IC sockets. The pins are more than 1/2" long. Mount witrh standoffs (important for mechanical stability) and solder on both sides of the board. E
I strip the insulation of some stranded wire and use the individual strands (30 AWG), bend a 1/16", 90 deg angle and feed the strand through the hole, than solder to the top of the pad. Insert socket and solder pin and wire on the bottom. A bit fiddely. Alternately you could find wire-wrap IC sockets. The pins are more than 1/2" long. Mount witrh standoffs (important for mechanical stability) and solder on both sides of the board. E
The board should have been designed so that the socket pins connect directly to points on the bottom layer blue lines. If they must connect to the top layer lines as well then vias can be used or, as suggested above, a thin wire strand can be inserted in the hole and soldered before the socket pin is inserted.
A long time ago, I remember buying just the machined pins located here https://www.mouser.com/catalog/catalogusd/645/1702.pdf These are part of a socket. A carrier, was used to temporarily hold the pins in place when they were soldered. You removed the carrier and you ended up with a bunch of pins.