Last night I stopped at Harbor Freight and picked up a ‘set’ of solid carbide drills. To call them a set is a silly as each package has 20 random sized bits. But since the packaging is clear, you can select the grab-bag set that has the rough sizes you need. At home I was able to drill out the PCB for the few through hole parts without any bit breakage or copper tear-out. For $8 these bits were very cost effective.
After drilling I even had a few minutes to solder the SMT amplifier into place. I hope to fully populate the board over the next few days.
The reason I was unable to spend alot of time on the PCB was that I am preparing to teach a class in LEGO NXT-G programming this weekend. I had to clean up last year’s slides and start to duplicate 20 disks for the participants. Luckily I have the DVD robot that will double as an automated duplicator. Just load in a bunch of blank CDs, launch the application and come back a few hours later to a nice stack of burned disks. Sweet.
That’s the same “set” of bits I’ve been using all these years.