Component Leg Bending Gauge for Breadboarding or PCB

thingiverse

To ready electronic components for mounting on a circuit board or breadboard, the legs must first be bent and trimmed. To ensure that the final width matches the 2.54 mm grid of standard breadboards, I designed two straightforward bending and cutting guides. One gauge is compact, suitable for widths ranging from 4 to 8 units, while the other is larger and deeper, accommodating broader components with greater diameters. The legs are clipped at the bottom of each gauge, fitting neatly into a breadboard. The gauges come in two versions: plain and embossed with numbers indicating the corresponding grid size. By altering the filament color during printing, these numerals can be printed in a contrasting hue using features like Cura's "Pause print at height" function. To prevent infill material from accumulating in the smaller structures on either side, I used a wall line count of 5 when slicing with Cura. The design files for these gauges are available in FreeCAD format, allowing users to modify them as needed. Please note that the font utilized in the ShapeStrings is IBM Plex Sans Bold; this font family can be downloaded from https://github.com/IBM/plex/releases/tag/v4.0.2 or substituted with a locally accessible typeface.