I was perusing Lady Ada’s blog and came across this article featuring an IC pin alignment tool.

If you’ve ever had to solder DIP-type integrated circuits you’ll know that you nearly always have to bend the pins in just a little bit, since they are shipped with a “bow-legged” stance. Usually this can be quite tricky to do, and always involves a bit of forward/backward twiddling to get them exactly right.

All you do is run the IC through the tool and the two bearings neatly align both rows of pins back to being vertical, so you can drop them straight into the board. Very neat.

What I particularly like about the design in the picture above is that it looks like it can be expanded to handle different IC widths.

Turns out that this is not the only one either (www.evilmadscientist.com):