After finals and some issues with snow and power loss I finally started soldering. I’m going from lowest profile components and moving up to make soldering easier. I’m still missing a single socket and an EPROM burner, but other than that all my parts are in order.
This is our work area, set up in my sisters old bedroom.
This is the board after I soldered the resistors on to the board.
The board after adding all but one of the sockets. The mill-max sockets, such as the ones in the center of the board, are slightly lower than the cheaper sockets, so I had to solder them first and follow up with the other style. While the mill-max sockets are nice looking and slightly sturdier, the cheaper sockets are much easier to solder and sturdy enough for the N8VEM in my opinion.
Finally, I added a few smaller componets and the S-100 bus connector.
Only 10 of the capacitors are installed so far. I’m planing on soldering the rest of the caps tonight, and the rest of the parts tomorrow. The only real difficulty so far has been holding some of the looser parts steady while soldering.
