The grainy picture (above) is the "front" of the board. The socket fits many SOIC parts, or can be ignored! The solder mask (green) covers the traces, but is transparent so you can tell which pad is associated with each SOIC lead.

And this fuzzy image (above) is the backside of the board. The pads without holes are electrically isolated. They are very handy for RF circuitry like chip capacitors, or soldering hand-wound coils.

This digital micrograph (above) is an actual Proto-B board. What you are seeing is a close up of the pads. You can see the metal "via" (tunnel) from the backside of the board to the front. The pads are bulging with SN63 solder. You can also see that the pad spacing is less than the diameter of the via. This allows you to bridge the pads with solder in order to connect them together. This picture has good resolution; try zooming on the image to see more clearly. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or later, place the cursor over the picture and use the "other" mouse button. Then select "zoom in".

When you inspect vias at high magnification, one of the things you look for is blistering in the vias, or voids in the metal. Also, when the weave of the board fiber shows, the via metal thickness is insufficient. These vias look smooth and bright like metal cylinders.

Jenmat is putting together a page that shows the various assembly methods. After poking around on the Internet, there seems to be a need for a couple of pages demonstrating assembly techniques and good workmanship. By the way, we'd love to see YOUR assembly techniques, especially if we can display them on our site.

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