DIY Terminal Strips

Not many of you may remember the time before circuit boards when parts in your TV were soldered between tube sockets and terminal strips. These terminal strips were mounted to the chassis with one or two screws or rivets.

(This terminal strip can be seen in the photo at right running vertically in the center of the image)
When printed circuit boards came along, all of this (labor intensive) type of construction went bye-bye and the manufacturing cost of your TV went down a bit.

This left a problem for those of us constructing custom equipment, how to join lots of wires inside a project without resorting to wirenuts.

One solution is to create a circuit board of stripes.

The board is then cut into strips that look like this. These strips can be mounted to any surface using double-stick tape or other means. Multiple wires can be soldered to each connection and the bare board in between prevents solder bridges. For higher voltages, more space can be provided between the connections. Also, the individual strips can also be cut down to smaller lengths as needed.