Beseentriker left a long time ago, so I am sure he is not going to reply. This was a great thread he made, it's cool to see it brought back to life.
I am not sure if you need to cut the trace to the first star. I know you are supposed to, but it appears in this case it worked without doing it.
Too bad he's gone, I'd be sending him my pills, to solder up for me.
Really nice clean work there! Takes a really steady hand.
The work really is clean and I'm sorry not to be able to anticipate more. I have 2 questions and 1 recommendation for anyone revisiting this thread. I am new here but already have enjoyed reading of and seeing so much nice work.
(1) Rather than filing the gold off the steel spring would it be better to tin the end of the spring and file that. Or maybe, as monanoke did, solder a copper contact to the spring.
(2) It appears BST deepened the pill socket in the reflector, but did he deepen the pill for the extra chip, or maybe build up the othe chips? And how do you protect the reflector surface from the shavings?
Recommendation: I have found that its much easier to pre-tin larger pieces (such as a pill)with a small butane pencil torch at any solder points before installing the driver. Much easier to bridge solder points that already exist without overheating anything else. Obviously, BST had no trouble, but the larger the pill, etc., the harder it gets.
Cutting the trace to the 1st star is completely unnecessary. It's not connected to anything but the border. It's sort of a fake/dummy star.
Of course, you can see there is no trace or via connected to the star.
Thank you
I just started removing the stock small spring and mounting a standard driver spring backwards. I have made a couple dozen so far and they are holding up fine.
