After digesting the lessons learned from the first board,
I got up my gumption to try another board. The second board turned out
much better although I still had to work the 0.25mm pitch socket manually to get
it acceptable.
I reordered the placement of components by geographic
region rather than by type (capacitor, resistor, diode) as I had for the first
board. This resulted in no repeats of knocking already placed components
off their pads.
I learned to drop the component on or near the solder pads
and then NOT try to move it with the tweezers. Instead I drop the tip of a
pick on the board and slide the pick into the component and thereby move it on
its pads. Ends up that works much better for me rather than trying to lay
the component right on the pad (which with no parallax doesn't work
well).
After I did the solder past run, I removed the solder on
the .25mm pitch 30 pin socket as it has "slumped" and covered several adjacent
pins. Flux may have seen it draw onto the pins, but I think there was just
too much and it would bridge again. So I removed the paste in that area
before popping it in the oven.
I then manually soldered on the .25mm pitch socket - again
got some pin bridging. I tried with a solder sucker and still bridging
remained. I was wishing I had some solder wick when I happened to think -
Hey! I'll bet if I strip the insulation off of some fine stranded copper wire -
I might could make a solder wick. Well after that was the answer. It
took the solder bridges right off.
I did, however, find that SMD pad dimensions for my diodes
was off considerably. The diodes just barely caught the solder on each
end. So redid the board diagram with the correct dimensions this time - I
laid a diode on a paper print out and it fit.
Now everything looks good, but have not finished with
connectors and cutting the board into two pieces.
Even though I am starting to get "use" to the 0805 size
components, I am still going to back up to the next larger size - since I have
the board space - just to make it easier on my nerves {:>).