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

Hello All. Remember Me?
Well, after some period of time I must report that scratch-based
etching (forget metal blue, its nasty stuff) is OK but it is really a
pain in the butt. Sharpie permanent marker pens work but you really
need to concentrate to cover a pcb as the ink will dissolve itself if
you go over the same area so you are limited to a single coat. My
plotter was OK but only for quite big traces and could just about
manage traces for DIP based IC packages with no routing between pads
(if that makes sense?).

Well, I recently went out and bought a laser printer, an HP Laserjet
1022 both for normal printing and some simple experimenting.
I have tried bog standard plain white printer paper and I would say
that I can reliably transfer about 75% of the toner onto copper
board, unfortunately the other 25% tends to be parts of thin traces
or chunks from the periphery of traces but there is usually some form
of slight transfer even here.
The paper does not easily lift from the board but will with a bit of
finger-touch scrubbing. I have tried writing paper as it is thinner
with similar results.

I clean the boards with those abrasive rubber things you can get from
Mapin and either IPA or Coldclean (also from maplin).
When people talk about scrubbing the board, the rubber thing tends to
polish the board with some extremely fine lines barely left on the
copper and the agents don't leave any visible residue. Shoudl these
lines be more visible (i.e. rougher abrasive - is this an oxymoron?)

I have not attempted any etching because of the overall standard of
the Toner transfer results.

Do anyone have any recommendations on board cleaning or Paper types
safe for laser printers? Please remember that I am UK only based and
so can only obtain UK products.

I can get a hold of the press and peel film and was also wondering if
this is also any good?

Many thanks for your time, PK