Breadboard maintenance tips?

[kalel]

Actually, that looks fairly promising.  Brass coloured contacts and pre-formed to a sharp diamond shape opening indicates that at least some care has been taken selecting metal for, and stamping the contact strips.  I don't have a genuine 3M breadboard purchased from a major distributor to compare with - maybe someone else can post a suitable photo?

My bad then. Of course, still, affordable is better.

[alank2]

Hopefully it wasn't expensive.

I paid $11 per board for 10 boards.

I used some strong magnets and they don't seem to be affected at all by the breadboard.

[alank2]

So I did a resistance test, not sure if it is good enough or not to figure out the plating or whether it is brass, etc.  I used some of Franky's fine 4 wire pinchers with my Fluke 8845A.  I connected them to a small pin to insert into the breadboard and did so at the top power busses which are 5 wide 5 pins each.  The 3M board from eBay has 0.0215 ohms, but another board I tested was 0.0460 or 0.0623 or even 0.1203.

[alank2]

Mike over at Assembly Specialist hooked me up with some powder coated plates to put the eBay breadboards on, so I should be GTG on breadboards for awhile.  The eBay seller who sold me the breadboards is here:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?_odkw=&_ssn=paula111751&item=202040059624&_osacat=0&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_from=R40&_trksid=p2046732.m570.l1313.TR10.TRC2.A0.H0.Xbreadboard.TRS2&_nkw=breadboard&_sacat=0

[ez24]

You get what you pay for.  Picture from another post (in case someone missed it)

I bet this breadboard cost a fortune in its day.

[Ian.M]

A four wire test along the full length of a power bus, with the forcing wires in the outermost pair of holes and the sense wires in the next pair of holes, the distance between the sense wire holes, together with accurate measurement of the individual contact finger width, the total width of the metal in the base of the strip including upturns and the thickness would be the minimum required to get an approximate figure for the resistivity that could be compared to that of various candidate alloys.   Its probably not worth it unless you have known good breadboards to compare to, due to the wide range of resistivity of cuprous alloys depending on their composition and purity.  However a resistance per inch figure for the bus bars, excluding contact resistance, could be a good metric for comparison to separate the good from the bad and ugly.

[kalel]

You probably do get what you pay for with these.
The MB-102 is so popular these days, that probably there's some difference in quality between boards. I.e. I guess not all are useless at arrival like mine is, while they might not last long.

I don't have the right tools or knowledge to properly reshape the contacts, so I will probably be unable to use it for anything. It's "easy" if you can afford it to get the most expensive one, but what the proper balance between cost and being useful is, that's a good question.

[David Hess]

If you don't have spares, it still may well be worth removing the backing to let you remove the affected contact(s) then carefully reshape them to restore contact tension.

The thing I have learned is not to exceed the maximum wire diameter.  On TO-220 parts for example, I solder short lengths of thinner round bus bar wire onto the leads rather than inserting the leads directly into the breadboard.

[tooki]

If you don't have spares, it still may well be worth removing the backing to let you remove the affected contact(s) then carefully reshape them to restore contact tension.

The thing I have learned is not to exceed the maximum wire diameter.  On TO-220 parts for example, I solder short lengths of thinner round bus bar wire onto the leads rather than inserting the leads directly into the breadboard.

Or just use flat jaw pliers to rotate the pins 90 degrees so they are parallel to the contact strips.

[bd139]

This is what I do. Learned that from the first edition of Art of Electronics

 If you wobble a TO220 lead in those shitty breadboards while checking continuity you will be a sad person though twisted leads or not.

[tooki]

Honestly, I've got a mix of breadboards, mostly Chinese, some 3M, and even among the Chinese ones there are massive differences. The worst one has around 1 ohm contact resistance (!!!), the better ones are similar to the 3M, though with less grip force.