An indespensible perfboard tool...

[Hal]

The Sharpie.  I finally started marking up my boards not too long ago.  Its really amazing how many mistakes this cuts down on.  I ususally have 4 colors when I do a board - black and red for power, and ususally green and brown for other components.  It helps me remember when I map out the board, and what not.  It sticks well to pheno. w/e, just thought i'd share :-D.

[pjwhite]

I use a Sharpie to mark pin 1 on DIP sockets on the back of the board.  That's enough for me to reduce mistakes by about 99%.  I never considered marking any other pins.

[jbm222]

I used some white wire for an entire pedal once and marked the ends with different colors to help me keep things straight.

[MartyMart]

The Sharpie.  I finally started marking up my boards not too long ago.  Its really amazing how many mistakes this cuts down on.  I ususally have 4 colors when I do a board - black and red for power, and ususally green and brown for other components.  It helps me remember when I map out the board, and what not.  It sticks well to pheno. w/e, just thought i'd share :-D.

Hal thats great, I've done that since the beginning !!
Helps reduce those "stupid" mistakes by 95%

Marty. :wink:

[petemoore]

Blue:
 Green:
 Red:
 Black:
 Especially handy for socketted tranny's that go E/W mixed with N/S...or for that Jfet pinout [I started always socketting Jfets with gate on the 'bottom']
 Just have to be sure to mark it right the first time.

[Mark Hammer]

Steve Daniels (Small Bear) sells some pad-per-hole boards that, besides being phenomenally well made and able to kick Rat Shacks boards out of contention as value for money, have a nice silkscreened legend along the edges that provides alphanumeric coordinates for those who start projects complex enough that you need a system to keep track.  If you want your projects to be rock-solid, the boards come in double-sided pretinned form as well, in a variety of sizes.

[B Tremblay]

While the Small Bear boards are of excellent quality, there is one small drawback: the board material cannot be trimmed to smaller size as easily as the RadioShack products.  The RadioShack boards can be scored with a knife and snapped into smaller sizes that can be very helpful in tight quarters.

[Mark Hammer]

True, but then one of the advantages of Steve's boards is that they only break into smaller portions when you want them to!  :wink:

They can be easily trimmed with your average Dremel tool.

[aaronkessman]

my rat shack board has that nice grid pattern and alphanumeric system too...

im sure steve's is better, but ive never had a problem with RS...

[rubberlips]

When I lay a vero board out, I generally select one of the top rows to be + and one of the bottom to be negative, makes it easy to remember...hmm what was a i saying

Pete

[Alex C]

Home Depot, Lowe's, and other hardware stores (Ace?) sell a 5-pack of colored electrical tape in red, blue, green, yellow, and black.  This is great for color coding all kinds of stuff.