I made a run with the magazine paper, and got dramatically better results.
The Dell laser printer doesn't have a straight though paper path, but I had no difficulty feeding magazine paper directly into the loop-around feed though the manual paper tray - even loading up multiple sheets to do successive copies worked fine.
The paper bubbled in places from the heat of the fuser, and I could smell chemicals burning off the page, but everything came though without jamming or wrinkling.
I scrubbed the toner off one of my earlier boards with acetone, gave it a good scrubbing with ordinary dish-soap and water, dried it, preheated it with the iron, then laid on the pattern.
I put solid pressure on it for 5-6 minutes, dropped it in a bowl of hot water, let it soak for about 20 minutes, and peeled off the paper.
Nothing got left behind on the paper at all, and the results were almost usable on the first attempt. Some of the traces have small breaks in them, and there's some bleeding where I believe I applied too much pressure. I could probably use this board with some resist ink and cutting.
There's some tweaking left to do, and I hope to get better results yet when I get some new boards I haven't over-scoured, but this is definitely a good start.
Thanks for all the advise!
-Andrew
--- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "James" <jamesrsweet@...> wrote:
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> > I've seen magazine paper used in another tutorial, but didn't see any discussion as to its benefits. It's cheaper than photo paper anyway, so I'll give it a try.
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> Well it's free, that's the first thing it has going for it, and a walk out to my mailbox on any given day has a good probability of yielding some so it's always on hand. The second is that it separates cleanly and leaves no residue between even fine tracks like the photo paper does. I soak for a few minutes then simply peel it off if it hasn't fallen off on its own and the board is ready to etch. One thing I have noticed is that some areas inhibit pitting of the copper more than others, in fact if you have large areas of copper you can see the graphics that were printed on the paper etched into them. I've been meaning to experiment more, I believe the areas that are printed with certain colors get no pitting at all. TRF film ought to solve this problem completely but as of yet I haven't had any luck with it, I may try an iron for that part since it will get hotter, or maybe something from the paper stops the TRF from sticking.
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> I might give some real trasfer paper a shot sometime as a consideration for final boards, but for prototypes the magazine paper is very adequate. If I make a mistake on the board and have to redo it, it's not a big deal if it only cost me 50 cents.
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> > Does Scotchbrite simply refer to those green synthetic dish scour pads? They don't seem like they'd be abrasive enough to scour copper.
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> Yep, and they do a great job, they're surprisingly abrasive, in fact the fresh ones can score the copper deeper than you want it if you press too hard.
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> > Does a laminator work substantially better?
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> The laminator made a HUGE difference for me. Instantly my transfer successes went from ~25% to very nearly 100%, the only failures I've had have been my fingers slipping causing the pattern to misalign. A further improvement came from modifying the laminator to get hotter.
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