Quality of life question and/or general commiseration: Pushing the leg into the breadboard

DIY STUFF
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Is there a trick for getting the leg of a component to slide smoothly in the breadboard? My flawless-insertion-to-bent-leg ratio is madness.

I’ve tried angling legs differently, pushing down with my finger, weeping helplessly, and even found out very abruptly that there is nothing between the adhesive and the metal sockets on the breadboard! (I tried to take the breadboard off the surface I stuck it to, and ripped the whole bottom/sockets out)

I’m wondering if there is a tip, or a trick, or of I can get an amen for this particularly unnerving phenomena. Thanks!

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  1. Get another breadboard. There are lots of crap ones out there.

  2. Get something with a hefty lead, like a 1N5817, and push that into the hole to loosen it up, then pull it out and put the actual part in.

  3. Use needle nose pliers to hold the leg near the end, making it harder to bend, and push it in.

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Thank you for essentially being my electronics crash-course instructor over the past week. I kinda compounded 2 and 3, and used the tip of the needle nose pliers to push into the hole and now they work like a charm!

Embarrassed to admit the amount of time I’ve wasted cursing and forcing these things in there.

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Yeah, I have a mix of cheapo and good. Good ones don’t always go in smooth, but crap always goes in crooked.

Worse is when a crap board leads you to think the circuit is busted and it isn’t, wasting days of troubleshooting.

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Does anyone have any recommendations for breadboard brands, please?

I have a single breadboard that is well over a decade old that never gives me any trouble, and a growing collection of utter crap from various sources that gives loose connections, and I seem unable to keep a circuit functioning for more than a couple of hours.

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I don’t have any specific recommendations, other than don’t get one of the fancy looking transparent ones. It might just be my crappy eyesight, but I find the board takes on a hue similar to the legs of the components, so find it really difficult to see which hole I’m shoving things into. :man_shrugging:

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I’ve bought a couple of these and found them acceptable:

Of course there’s no guarantee they haven’t changed suppliers since then.

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Ironically mine was from Microcenter so it’s a bit more on the expensive side. Like the $1 I spent on a box containing two-1uf caps from them.

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plo;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ← is the advice from my cat XD haha.

but what i usually do is get a DIP socket and bend the legs of that out by 90 degrees and stick the IC in that =)

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