Sorry to butt in, but I have a suggestion. I use collet pin carries, these are metal carriers with machined pins attached to them. You solder them on the board, remove the carrier, then you have 16 nicely placed machined pins free standing. This allows much easier inspection of the final solder joint since you don't have a plastic dip case in the way, I buy them by the 1000 at about 5 cents each (14 pin carriers, but you can get them any size) and that satifies all my socket needs. If I need 16 pin,20 pin or 40 pin (rare) sockets I simply remove the pins from a couple carriers and manually solder them. Also works well for transistors, caps, resistors or what have you. steve