I am gaining experience in soldering components onto PCBs. I'm working through some one sided through hole PCBs and one thing that I'm having trouble with is holding components once I flip the board. I generally tend to not like bending the leads when I flip the board. There are two reasons -- one being that they still don't seem to fit tightly, not to mention you can't bend the leads of some components (e.g. short lead capacitors) and the second being that they don't solder on nicely. With bent leads, they can even sometimes be touching other soldering points in some cases (after cutting excess off).
The only thing stopping me from attaching all the components and then flipping it and soldering all the leads is that
- as soon as I flip it components fall out
- the components which are taller than others (e.g. electrolytics) dictate the other components to fall to that height.
The components falling out when I flip the board I can overcome by using a bit of card to hold them while I flip it. I experimented with some sponge to hold the components in their respective heights when I solder but not much success.
The best I can come up with is soldering in 'layers' with the shortest components first (resistors etc) and slowly building up until reaching the layer of electrolytic capacitors.But again, ideally I would like all the components on the board together and then just solder them all in one swipe.
Any better ways of doing this? Any pointers?