Well, the board is all but complete now, I still have to borrow a set of correct crimpers to hook up the J1, J2 and J3 looms. Will get on to that a bit later.
here is the finished article, not a lot different to the last pic but just with the transformer wires soldered in and board in place.
Here are my observations.
I wasn't sure whether to fit the heat sinks before or after soldering in the bridges, I went for before as I wasn't sure if I could hold the nuts tightly enough that secure the heat sinks in place.
The down side to this is the heat sink grease is messy stuff and if you are not careful it would be quite easy to contaminate the board where you are about to solder the legs in place.
I would suggest probably leaving the heat sinks til last.
The bridges are hard to hold in place while you wrestle the legs into position. I first tried to use a G clamp to hold them together but this was quite cumbersome so in the end I found a couple of rubber bands did a fair job. You can see these in the pic above where I have left them in place for reference.
I unsoldered all the transformer wires which in the end probably wasn't neccesary but it did make the board a lot easier to handle and saved me from dragging the transformer around everywhere.
I went a bit crazy sanding back the board in order to have a good surface to solder to. While this is good practice I ended up sanding off the screened on locations for the transformer wires.
It was possible to refer back to the before pics and find the E1 to E12 locations but it would have been a lot easier if they were left intact.
I did make a point of writing these in permanent marker but every time I cleaned the board down with contact cleaner in order to remove the flux the markings washed away and I had to do them again.
One of the transformer wires lives right underneath the resistor at R1, if you have removed the transformer wires it would be a good idea to solder this wire (I think it was E1) back in place before fitting the resistor.
The diodes are polarised so you need to make sure you orient them the right way, the board will guide you with this as it has a band symbol printed which shows you where the diodes should fit.
I wasn't sure if the resistor next to the diodes was polarised so a quick search on google told me they were not, but just to be sure I soldered mine in the same way as shown in ninos post (which turned out to be opposite the way I was planning)
Last of all I gave the exposed copper parts of the board a coat of specialised clear circuit board lacquer. You need to be careful when spraying this stuff as it takes a fair while to dry, it can run a bit and you don't want to coat the fuse holders or the J1-J3 pins with it.
Anyway, fingers crossed it all works!!
