In keeping with my “always test everything before combining to make a larger piece”, I wanted to test each half strip as they’re being made. Since I didn’t want to be soldering on wires and removing them later, and since each strip has pads along the edges for the connector, I grabbed a 2x4 header, removed the middle two on one side so it would fit around the LED, and the other row became contacts for the pads. Works like a charm! Pardon the crappy cell phone quality … too lazy to pull out big camera.
Neat hack, I like that idea, gonna make one of those up for myself 
Would it be worth putting some heat shrink on the outer 2 gripping pins to avoid the chance of shorting the pins on the LED?
I actually put heatshrink on after I took the picture, but for a different reason: I didn’t want to scratch the black mask. As for shorting the LED, what you would actually do is shorting the individual driver pins, so when one gets pulled low, all three channels will light up instead of just the one that just went low (so your LED will show white instead of the one channel you just turned on.) On the other side of the LED, they’re all VCC and since the header pin isn’t connected to anything, shorting those three pins will do exactly nothing.
Ah I see, so it wouldn’t be needed for electronic safety, but useful for protecting the board. Thanks for sharing this neat idea; I’m going to have a go at making up something based on this for testing LED strips, saves the hassle of soldering and desoldering.
Originally I just bent them out of the way a little. Even when I didn’t, they were still far enough not to touch the pins. It’s just a tight fit.