Has anyone experiemented with wax ribbon printers? I didnt see
anything so far, in my searches.
I've been trying with progress for a few months now.
I bought an eltron/zebra shipping printer, which is basically a
thermal print-head that heats up to rastorize the image (just like an
old-fashioned fax machine).
The premium thermal printers use wax, wax/resin, or resin ribbons.
And normal direct thermal printers will also work if you run the
ribbon above the paper (or whatever your trying to print to) - the
head heats the ribbon, melts the wax and the pressure rollers
transfer the image to the surface material.
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So when I hacked the printer apart, and sandwitched the ribbon, I
found the same problem with the inkjet printing methods - the board
must be HEATED in order for the thermal wax to transfer. This
normally happens 100% with thin paper, as the thermal head produces
enough heat to heat the paper, but not a copper board.
The difference would definately be the speed - as a thermal transfer
printer, at its slowest speed will run easily fast enough to feed a
heated copper board thru the rollers (which I have yet to test).
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On my earlier tests, I mounted a 980nm / 350 ma laser diode to my cnc
x/y/z table (normally used for milling). With the bare copper board
in the work area laying nicely ontop of a kitchen hot-plate, I was
able to rastorize a circuit board with a wax-ribbon taped to the
surface of the copper board. Unfortunately, the heat from the
hotplate varied so much, it ended up melting ALL the wax to the
board, or not enough to make it work. I stopped testing this,
because as I have found, in order to properly activate the thermal
ribbons, PRESSURE is needed to tranfer the wax on the ribbon to the
copper board.
Some light documented results of my laser / thermal transfer tests
can be found here:
http://www.raidgear.net/rnd_laser.aspx