Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Homebrew PCBs

This weekend I etched some boards with .010" wide traces with .010"
wide spacing. After etching I found a couple of traces "broken" so I
had to repair them and with these old eyes, it wasn't easy but I did
get it.

I tinned the board using solder paste (plumbers paste) as I have
been doing. I then extracted some strands of conductor from
stranded wire and tinned that.

To make the "jumper", I laid the strand against the trace, and
pressed down with the soldering iron tip and it held. It worked
fine for all the breaks I had to fix.

I did try to drag solder over the gaps to bridge them, but couldn't
get that to work. Further complicating it was the small traces and
close proximity of the traces - I would end up shorting out several
traces together.

While not an ideal solution, it worked pretty good.

As to the reason for the breaks in the traces - just being in too
much of a hurry. After doing the toner transfer, I inspected the
boards very good and did notice the missing toner. Knowing that the
Sharpie pen is too blunt to patch the spot, I just went for the
etching. I really should have cleaned the boards and tried the
transfer process again - it would have been much faster and easier.

Chris