[sdiy] Cutting PCBs w/ dremel tool

[Roy J. Tellason]

On Monday 24 January 2005 10:37 pm, s wrote:
> Hello Guys-
>
> Have any of you tried to cut PCBs with the rotary cutting bits for dremel 
> tools at all? Did it work well?

I haven't tried it,  don't think I'd want to unless I had a "drill press" 
attachment for one and some way of precisely controlling the position of the 
board while cutting.  There's a fair amount of interest in small CNC machines 
to do exactly this sort of thing,  and I'm a member of a whole bunch of 
mailing lists that touch on the subject.  The general consensus of opinion 
seems to be that the runout of the bearings/spindle of the dremel is too much 
for any sort of real precision work.  I will probably be building a machine 
to do this sort of thing in the not-too-distant future and expect to use 
something else for a spindle,  perhaps a laminate trimmer or something like 
that.

> Or, do the cutting wheels work better? I've seen the fiberglass based wheels 
> for cutting and they seem like they'd work too.

Not if you need any sort of precision control over radius,  they won't!

> Which  would you recommend?

See above.  There are people out there that have built such things,  and I 
guess if you don't need a whole lot of precision it's possible to use a 
dremel,  though it isn't often recommended.  I don't have any URLs handy for 
such machines,  but it shouldn't be too hard to find some in your favorite 
search engine.