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

--- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "Wayne" <warp_kez@...> wrote:
Wayne,

I know of at least 3 types of T-Shirt transfer paper: The first is a
special paper sold by screen supply shops that is intended to be used
as a carrier for silkscreen ink and then transferred to a shirt using
a heat press. I have tried this paper for the toner transfer method
with dismal results. The next type of paper is for ink jet printers
where you print on the paper and heat tranfer the image to a shirt.
The transparent ink gets transferred to the light colored shirt and
the image is set by the heat. This paper is rather costly, about a
buck a sheet. You are better off with the blue press and peel stuff. I
have not tried this paper with my laser printer. The last paper is for
dark colored shirts and is a white backing that gets heat pressed to a
dark shirt, showing off your ink jet image (like printing on white
paper and glueing it to a shirt). This must be the paper you refer to
as it seems to contain some kind of plastic. This process would be
useless for making PCB's because the whole board would be covered with
white backing paper and therefor not etched at all. You could hand cut
a stencil from it but that kind of misses the point of the toner
transfer process.


> From what I understand, the key element is the plastic content of the
> toner. Following that line of thought, t-shirt transfer paper should
> also contain a level of plastic as it is designed to withstand
> washing, and sun-bleaching.