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Hi group well I have been making PCB's for many years now starting from using my moms fingernail polish as a etch resistant. I have never had much luck doing the toner transfer method so most of my boards lately have been done using photo sensitized boards. Well my old Brother laser printer died so I dismantled it and threw away anything I didn't have a need for. So now doing artwork on a inkjet was not so good, never dark enough and I was using vellum paper because I didn't have any transparency sheets that would work on a inkjet. So my last few boards were not so good even a few total failures. This is expensive using photo boards.
Well I decided to buy another cheap laser printer so I found a like new HP P1102w for $40. So now I could make transparencies now. Yesterday I decided to give toner transfer another go, and I printer some artwork on some parchment paper and run it through the laminator. To my surprise it came out almost perfect. Well I thought life was good until I noticed my artwork was backwards. So I did it again but this time total failure, I spent the rest of the evening trying got make another board. Tried running in through the laminator more and less times, remove the artwork hot and cold, different board clenaing methods tried wax paper. But nothing made a board as good as the first one. Well just before going to bed for the night I decider to rough up a board with sand paper and that worked the best but not perfect still some traces did not stick.
So as I went to sleep I thought about and it came to me that toner doesn't want to stick to copper because the cleaner I got the copper the worst my results were. So today I tried sanding again with some results then I decided to clean a board as uaual but this time I put it in some acid/hydrogen peroxide solution I etch with and let it turn brown then I took it out rinsed it in water, dried it and using parchment paper again I ran it through the laminator 7 times and let it cool some and this time every bit of toner stuck the copper. It produced a perfect board to my standards. After etching I cleaned it up with a Brillow pad and the copper traces look nice and shinny. Also when I ran it through the laminator inside a carrier there was some artwork that was on the carrier that had come off a paper I had run through it earlier and it stuck to the back side of my board and totally came off the cardboard and stuck the the PCB. So when you do a slight etch of the PCB before laminating it, the toner sticks to it like super glue. Hope this helps someone struggling like I did getting toner to transfer to the copper.
Bill N7OQ