# Shrinking drill hole size in Eagle

The last time I did a successful PCB, the drill hole size relative to the component pad size is rather huge to the point where when I entered the soldering stage, the component wires were not connecting to the pads correctly.

What I want to do in eagle is change the drill holes on every device (with small pins) on my PCB so that they are about 1/64ths of an inch instead of Eagle's preferred size, that way, when I drill, I drill a small amount of copper but at the same time, the copper will meet with the hole and the odds of a strong connection are higher.

Is there a quick way I can make the drill holes smaller in eagle without having to manually edit each part one-by-one?

• The general idea is that a cad package represent the manufactured result. If you want to change the resulting hole sizes, you can do that with the wrench tool, scripts, or even sed on the raw xml files. But if you don't want to change the intended size of the hole, but merely generate your etch images with smaller holes, that's the role for something like drill-aid.ulp. Contrast if you actually shrink the alleged-result defined sizes of the holes to facilitate your drilling, and then order boards from a real board house with changing them back, you might find header pins, etc won't fit. – Chris Stratton Jul 24 '16 at 7:29

There is an User Language Program (ULP) for this, in the standard distribution. It is called drill-aid.ulp.