First thing to do is to bend all the legs for the diodes into 90 degree joints. You can bend them all at once using the lowcost diode bender that we sell, by using some kind of straight edge (I use tweezers), or, if you have a ridiculous amount of free time, you can cut them away from the strip, and bend them one at a time. If you bend them all at once, you next need to cut away the tape. You can safely cut some of the legs away without any issues, so don’t worry about losing a small amount of leg length.