Making circuit boards - easy?

I have a bunch of bright red LED's - about 60 - from a brake light. From this I wanted to make small clusters out of them for other purposes such as retrofitting brake lights, so I ended up breaking the circuit board and gluing them together to make a cluster, then mending the circuit to work right. The way im doing it is messy and flimsy and it would be great to design my own circuit board at home - to mount the LEDs on a sturdy surface and have a solid, evenly spaced cluster construction....

Is this easy to do?

If it is, could someone tell what it involves and the things I would need from RadioShack, if they are available there? If it is simple and cheap, im sure it would be fun doing.

Thanks

go to radio shack and buy there perfboard...it's fiberglass PCB that has a grid of holes evenly spaced in it and copper around the holes to solder to...easy as pie...

comes in different grid sizes, so make sure you get the right size...

Thanks, that sounds easy enough. In regard to the different grid sizes...can I just cut the board to the size I need it?

Also, to make the connections underneath, what do you commonly use - small wire...paths of solder?

yeah...think of the grid as a piece of graph paper, the holes are at the intersections of the lines...

i'm not sure on the material they're made out of, but it's probably fr-4 or fiberglass...thickness of thin corregated cardboard but much stiffer and stronger...cut it with a dremel or a hacksaw or something like that...

if the traces are right next to each other i usually use solder bridges, they're much easier than trying to solder a small piece of wire down...use wire for longer traces...

good luck...

oh yeah, another option for making traces...there's a conductive pen out that writes in a conductive silver 'ink'...you could just draw your traces out...never tried or seen it done, but i have seen them on digi-key and a couple other places...

Hey papasan, when i found the boards in radioshack there were two kinds...."Prepunched Perfboard" which was just the grid with holes and "General-Purpose Component PC Board" which was exactly the same but has copper around the holes on one side and a grid and numbering on the other side. Well I didnt know which one to get so I got both....they were cheap enough anyway
Whats the difference...just one has copper so the solder sticks and holds the compoents tight to the board?

yeah, you want the copper clad one...plain fiberglass doesn't hold solder very well and your LEDs might come off...sorry about that, should have explained better...let me know how it goes...