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

in the photos section under JMBoard Images is a photo of my first
successful Inkjet PC Board! Well yes I am thrilled... This board has
good runs to 6 mil. 5 and 4 mill would have been OK but the runs broke
at the pad. Not sure but I attribute this to puddling on the pad and
the surface tension of the puddle tugging on the ink at the attaching
run, causing it to thin there.
Quite a lot of work to get there for me. Took three different C84's
have found that once the heads are plugged, on some, they are REALLY
plugged. Soaked them in Steves potion for several weeks and still no
luck, and in fact am still soaking them. All of them had plugged
vacuum pump lines if not from the head port to the port support stand
then from the port support stand through the pump to the "sponge" or
both! The printer I used for this board still has banding in the black
cartridge. I programmed Dip Trace for a muddy brown which uses the
three color cartridges CMY when I did this board.
I stripped one of the printers down to the chassis cut the chassis
above the feed roller as Stephan suggested, set the whole frame up
about .185" (4.7mm)using PC board spacers and a 4-40 jack screw on the
frame left side.
Curing the MIS ink is as Stephan said critical. Amazing, the wifes
kitchen oven (Jennair) has a digital temperature display. Checked it
with the pyrometer, not only was it 20 F low it had a +-25-30 F spread
above and below the set point, which is all the digital display turned
out to be - a display of set point :). Still I used it to cure this
board because I could play with the temp control as the board was
"cured" to regulate the temp. So the next project is to modify the
toaster oven for curing/reflow.
Lots to do yet, but am excited and wanted to share these initial results.