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

previous by date index next by date
previous in topic topic list next in topic

Subject: Re: [Homebrew_PCBs] plating holes with an exploding wire

From: Andrew Leech <coronasensei@...>
Date: 2012-12-06

Love it, that sounds fantastic! I'm guessing it'd be pretty darn loud
though, the neighbors may be less impressed.

Andrew

On 6/12/12 2:54 PM, Jeff wrote:
>
> A friend descried to me a method for plating through holes. The
> plating is accomplished by inserting a wire into the hole and applying
> a high voltage to the wire, exploding it and connecting the layers
> together. A pdf is available on google. It was too big for yahoo.
> Despite the questionable looking address, it is real.
>
> https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B9UJMWQidYN0ZE1yNWEzQmluSWc
>
> Curt's description
> It involves feeding a thin copper wire through the hole until it
> touches a massive ground plate which allows a capacitor charged to 300
> - 400 volts to discharge and literally melt the wire rapidly enough to
> cause it to 'explode' and bond to the internal copper layers. I find
> that 10 to 15 bursts leave enough copper for a sturdy through hole. I
> use an X Y table to position the board under a chuck that grips the
> wire and is connected to the high voltage source. A small stepper
> motor feeds the wire through the chuck from a spool.
>
> Jeff
>



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]