Well yeah, but back 15 years ago, it was $40 a board minimum copies 3 (or maybe $5 per board with $100 non-recurring engineering fee for a 2-layer board). Back when Radio Shack was big, people were doing hand-crafted PCBs by drawing out your traces with a permanent market and manually drilling holes into PCB-stock.

> I really wish wire wrap was still common. Wire wrap was actually more durable and reliable than PCBs, and for a lot of hobby projects would be easier and faster than designing a PCB and having it made. I wonder if there is a big enough hobbyist market for a wire wrap revival?

Wire wrap's main problem is that the wire-wrap sockets needed to make good, reliable contacts, are on the order of $1 each, so if you need to put like 5 chips on a board, you're well into "Might as well make a full custom 4-layer PCB", especially when you consider that SMT parts are so much more common these days.

But if you wanna talk Wire Wrap...

https://www.peconnectors.com/wire-wrap-sockets-and-headers/

https://www.vectorelect.com/terminals-wire-wrap.html

I know how to do that for sure. But... with PCBs so incredibly cheap these days, why bother? Its not like the $150+ days for a PCB, where $1 per socket, $10 wire-wrap boards and $0.10 per pin wire-wrap terminals were much cheaper than PCBs.

Today, its probably cheaper to order a PCB (even 3x copies) for $20 or whatever, and then throw away the other 2 copies, rather than getting into wire-wrap. The main benefit of wire-wrap is that if you've got a large collection of PCB parts + wire-wrap sockets, you can design and build a board today without waiting on stuff. But I wouldn't consider the wire-wrap way to be much cheaper.

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SMT for the most part has taken over through-hole in general (including wire-wrap). There's SMT-to-through hole stock boards you can keep, but I feel like learning KiCAD and just spending the $20 each time you wanna make a proper SMT board is the better idea.

The only exception is that through-hole can be built with stock parts in a "prestocked lab". If you want a "resistor book", a through-hole set of resistors + pre-made breadboard proto-boards is a good tool (especially if you have transistors, LEDs, Diodes, voltage regulators, and OpAmps).

You can solve a lot of problems by just combining simple things in a lab in half-an-hour... and then a few wires here and there to connect your doo-hicky to an Arduino or something is useful. Through hole remains a useful tool, although it'd be expensive to stock enough parts (resistor book, capacitor book, some trim-pots, LEDs, voltage regulators of various kinds, a few microcontrollers, breadboards, crimpers, connectors, etc. etc.) to get to this point.

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Anyway, I think the through-hole community has largely settled upon two kinds of boards:

1. "Xacto-knife" boards, like Vectorbord 8019 (https://www.vectorelect.com/8019-1.html), where you're supposed to cut the traces that are too long and make them into individual lines as needed.

2. "Pad-per-hole" boards, like Vectorbord 8003 (https://www.vectorelect.com/8003.html), where you'its intended for you to spill solder between lines that should be connected.

These two techniques are pretty good, but you still need to create wires between points in practice. Wirewrap can serve the job. And arguably, solder+wire is generally considered a bad idea (the solder can internally break before the more flexible copper breaks, so you end up making a less reliable connection than what's possible with wire-wrap)

But you'll find that the amount of opportunity to use wirewrap is still small per project, and it should be "just one technique" for making connections, not the main technique above all else. Soldering is probably the closest you have to a "bread and butter" skill that's used everywhere.