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

Rick,
I have used the same pulsar methods and have gotten reasonable results from them.
Though I do not have dozen upon dozen under my belt I have done my share.

If i could fully control things. I would say my biggest issue is the printer stage,
I never have scale/size issues. nor should you... you should be getting 100% accurate sizes.
good news is this is controllable. and most likely from within your print dialog.
I have tried a few different printers all with different and same results. The one
thing they share that Is do not like is the distribution of toner. In some of my pour areas. I find they are not soilid enough sometimes too much toner is some areas while in others not enough. all with the same print file/etc... just changing the printers so to say.
This is the core if my issues. Bad toner transfers result in bad down the line.

Enough so that even the green foil cant bond well enough to areas that lack in toner.

Holes:
Some of my first ever boards were done completely on a CnC machine. while the accuracy was spot on and the hole drilling was nice. I found it to be too time consuming. and the potential for possible failure due to oversights was .001 But my biggest complaint from a CnC version
was Most of my project boards were small and had lots of small traces that were very close together. after cutting some boards I spent a considerable amount of time cleaning up all the copper tails left behind. which if unattended would result in failed boards. the time spend was too much imho. Which led me to doing them the way i currently doing them.

Draw up the schematic in Diptrace.... print.... etch.... drill.... test... solder... drink beer.
I would say 9 out of 10 boards I do are double sided.

Printers used: Hp LJ 1300, HPLJ 5, HPLJ 1100 and a samsung ML2955w.
they all perform equally imho.

-Sam






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