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

Just joined this list, but I've made PC boards (of varying degrees of crudeness)over most of my nearly 50 years as a ham. My interests are primarily fairly simple single-sided board prototypes, but with the ability to fight SMT gradually ebbing I figured it was time to get serious, as the Dremel tool etcher has its limitations ;-)

I've been practicing with the toner transfer method and quit digging through the recycle bin in search of the right free paper and made my first board using the Pulsar material today. The image transferred completely and it was MUCH easier, as the dextrin paper came off easily. But the quality of the image wasn't much better than what I've been getting and certainly nothing like the examples I've seen. Mostly, jaggy traces, uneven edges, pinhole voids in the groundplane areas, etc. It will make a usable board, but I thought I'd seek some advise that might hasten my trip up the learning curve.

The key variables I see are repeatability of the heat source and the toner. I'm still using a household iron, and I'm sure my application process couldn't be much more inconsistent in terms of temperature, pressure, pattern, time, etc. My printer is an HP-5000 with everything cranked up to max, but it probably could use a new toner cartridge (which I'll just go ahead and do).

I'm not sure which variables in the process are causing the issues I'm seeing, but would the GBC hot roll laminator would be the next logical step toward better results?

Thanks and 73,
Bob W9RAN