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Subject: Re: [Homebrew_PCBs] Re: TT: getting the toner to stick (Don't forget the gravy)

From: Alan King <alan@...>
Date: 2004-03-10

Phil wrote:
>
> wow, that's kind of rude and very irritating... I spent half a day
> fussing with this stuff with like 10 different trials and 4 different
> kinds of paper. Others indicated similar problems.

Sorry if you read it that way. But that is a terribly low amount of time and
attempts at a new process, and you made little if any mention of the good points
that it has, even though they are much more important than problems in initial
passes when you're unfamiliar with what you're doing. Problems as mentioned are
usually clear and easy to eliminate later, good points are what's important and
often hard to come by. And regardless that others also haven't worked with it
much yet to get it right, the original posted pics already left little doubt
that it can work quite well, which means it is more a failing in both of our
materials or processes to date than the idea.

Although I will admit that I don't tend to worry nearly so much about being
politically correct as most people you may be used to. I type fast and simply
say what I'm thinking, so it may not always sound exactly right or be sugar
coated like most people do. Don't like it, feel free to fight back with your
own good ideas. Competing ideas make for far more rapid analysis and
development than worrying about 100% political correctness anyway. Plus with
probably 25 or 30 lists coming in, I am flying through when I am replying to
messages so I rarely edit and some things may definitely not be phrased the
right way for intended meanings to start with..



and by the way, i
> did not say this technique had no merit.

I wasn't saying you did. I only said that even with my own poor results
initial pass I already do see high merit from other observations. And you must
be reading most of that message as directed at you or something. Past the break
was already largely typed up before your message even hit the list and cut and
pasted in since they were both on the same subject. I often do this so there
aren't lots of excess seperate messages from me all on the same subject. If
they're related they go together anyway, but it wasn't all about you.

But on the other hand you did say this " I'm skeptical of this working well
for 8 mil traces and
tqfp packages." Why would you be skeptical already? You've only played with
the method one morning for a very small number of attempts. That is not to
belittle your work, but even 10 or 20 so far is a very small amount for process
development, especially when considering the materials are basically free.
Developing stuff like this often takes years in production, so often weeks or
months at home. Hundreds of attempts would start being a more reasonable number
to draw conclusions from, it may take 10 or 20 times this initial stab to start
getting things under control.




> Guess I just don't measure
> up to your godliness. I hope you can figure this out for us mere
> mortals to slavishly follow you.
>


A large amount of patience and a good long term view of development hardly
qualifies as godliness. But with familiarity that my current process evolved
over 6 months or more before it truly became excellent does make me a little bit
skeptical that you've tried much in only one morning. I tried many variations
at once too, but it'll be weeks of other ideas popping into mind to start
thinking it isn't likely to provide good results. And overall development time
doesn't affect the validity or ease of a process, I can still show or explain
how to do what I'm now doing in a short time so it doesn't take others 6 months
to get the same results. The only difference is long term viewpoint, I likely
got far worse results than you had, yet see it as a far more positive thing
because the few things that did go right are the ones that are usually hardest
to make work. Wrinkling etc should be dealable later in one manner or another.

Alan