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

A quick check of the archives did not show that anyone had tried this, so I will relay this little test I just did.

I was thinking about making a flex ribbon for a small lcd display I bought. I decided to do a quick test with some copper foil tape and 1 mil kapton tape.
I laminated the sticky sides of the copper tape and kapton tape together. Since I was doing a quick and lazy test, I just used a permanent marker to create some linear traces like you would see on a regular ribbon connector.
Again, because I was doing a very quick test, I etched the traces in ferric chloride that I did not bother to heat, though I did use the bubbler.
After about 15 minutes, the copper was etched away sufficiently. The trace quality was low, because of the quick and dirty nature of this test, however the traces were bonded to the kapton tape and were continuous.
I was surprised to see that the adhesive on the kapton was still effective in the areas where the copper was etched away as well.
With this test, I am confident that this method would be viable for creating custom flex circuit connectors.