>From: Brian D Chase <bdc@world.std.com>

>Does anyone have experience with building low-volume custom
>PCBs that won't cost us lots of money?

Yes, I've had *very* good luck with APC's (www.apcircuits.com) "proto 1"
service, which is cheap and has amazingly fast turnaround.  There are a
couple of catches -- no solder mask (no biggy when hand-assembling as long
as you're careful), no silk screen (well DEC didn't use that either), no
gold plated edge fingers, and all boards must be rectangular so you'd have
to cut out the funny notches by hand to make it fit a Q-bus slot.  Not at
all insurmountable though.

>Or does anyone know if there are
>suppliers somewhere which have old stashes of Q-Bus prototyping boards?

I bought a few of the Vector dual-height proto boards when they were still
available, but they ran up around $30 each before disappearing so they
weren't a very good deal (and no per-hole pads so they're really wire-wrap
only, which won't fit in a DEC backplane very well).  I always thought the
smart thing to do if you want to do a lot of hand-wired type stuff, would be
to do a PCB layout of *only* the edge connectors, and then attach those to
blank perfboard (which is *much* cheaper) using sheet metal (or scrap PCB
material with the copper etched off) and screws.  Never did anything about it
though, except for doing a PCB decal definition of the DEC edge fingers for
the PADS/PCB freeware package, with the even/odd offset pads and everything
(just like DEC's own boards).  And some place I have a dual-height board
outline done from the drawings in one of the DEC handbooks.

John Wilson
D Bit