[sdiy] So, Kapton Tape

[Nils Pipenbrinck]

On 08/21/2018 08:46 PM, MTG wrote:
> Excuse my ignorance here, but I'm looking at Polyimide Film, 1/4" from
> Mouser. My choice is either acrylic adhesive or silicon.  Hmmm, ... no
> idea.  Thoughts?

Not on the glue, but:

> I have some board level repair work that requires 30 AWG wire jumpers on
> it and I wanted to secure that to the board in one spot. I was going to
> use hot glue, but I thought this would be cuter.

I did a lot of board patching a year ago, and I always used hot glue for
this purpose. I just cut a tiny piece of hot glue from the stick, hold
it on the glue point with tweezers and melt it with hot air. While hot
pull the wire straight through the small hot glue puddle, blow to cool
and you have a nice and neat fastening point. The top of IC packages
make excellent glue points btw, and you don't want to use you best pair
of tweezers for this job.

Kapton tape does not work for this purpose as well because if you pull
the wire the glue is not sticky enough to hold it in place. The tape
will lift from the PCB and the wire will start to move around.


What Kapton take is excellent for: rework of top layer traces:

Say you have messed up your layout and a piece of the board needs to be
patched. You can cut the bad trace with a scalpel, remove the
surrounding components, remove the remaining solder and give the board a
good clean-up. Then cover the entire area with Kapton tape. Use a
scalpel to free the solder pads that you need to solder on.

You can now lay new traces with copper foil. Then solder on your
components. The Kapton will survive the heat. The soldered components
will keep the Kapton tape in place. This is even survives cleaning with
IPA and ultrasound.

Nils