PCB milling machines??

[Ingo Debus]

jhaible wrote:
> Terrible stuff, if you're asking me.
> I know because I spent a lot of time looking for shorts on boards that were
> done that way.

:-))) Ha, me too!
Unless you don't solder very careful, you get lots of solder joints
between pads and the neighboring copper. Since that copper is cold, the
solder often sticks immediately to it. It's much more difficult than
soldering an etched pcb. I think that's where I really learned to solder
careful ;-)


> You always have the problem of adjusting the height of the tool, the board
> never being
> perfectly planar or even resonating at certain rotation speed of the tool.
> So you end up
> either removing too much copper - or the contrary. We used to look for
> shorts that were
> caused by copper connections that were too tiny to see them - decide which
> traces are
> shorted, and then burn away the connection with a strong current source.
> A mere nightmare.

Well, the milling takes some learning curve, like etching does too. If
you know the tricks you can get quite good results. If anyone's
interested I could write more about it.

Ingo (Lizenz zum Loeten)