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

I was discussing using a household clothes iron to apply toner resist
with a friend of mine, and discovered he had a heat press - the kind
that puts iron on transfer designs on T shirts. Since I was very
unhappy with the household iron technique, I took him up on his offer
of trying it out on his press. We preheated the press to 300 Degrees
Farhenheit, and placed the circuit board and magazine paper in the
press between 2 pieces of printer paper. We got to talking about
other things, and wound up leaving it in the press for 6 minutes.
The design transferred real well, but it also had penetrated the
magazine's paper. As a result, I had to soak the paper for over a
half hour, and even then some of the toner was rubbed off with the
paper, and I couldn't rub some of the paper off of the toner.
It etched real well. I had a plastic tub about an inch shorter than
the board, so I put a small amount of etchant in the bottom of the tub
and used a natural bristle brush to "brush on" etchant at the highest
point of the board.
If I had it to do over again, I would try 2 or 3 minutes in the press
maximum. I feel the toner wound up spreading out some and losing
resolution when I left it in too long. It's still perfectly usable,
just not as pretty as it could be.