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

The special waxed paper came in WAY ahead of the promise date - got it today. Wonderful material! I drafted a 1" long scale with 10 major and 30 minor divisions on it using DesignCAD V14. It was then printed, mirror image, onto the wax paper. I printed 4 coupons at a time. Two of these coupons were taped to 2 small pieces of copper plate.



I ran my copper plates with the waxed paper on top through my laminator 10 times. Then I put the samples in the freezer for 15, not 30 minutes. The paper fell away from the toner. Then I dropped the two samples in rather used up ferric chloride that I put out in the Arizona sun. Every 15 minutes I would bump the container. After an hour I pulled out the samples. The toner was solid and I had etched down about 0.001" according to my caliper. The fine lines of the scale and numbers all looked perfect.



My last small challenge is figuring out how to color the background and leave the raised copper areas shiny. I tried coating the entire surface and then abrading the raised area. Didn't do a very good job but the technique shows promise.



IMG_1203.JPG



Thanks for the great procedure Dave,



Rick





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