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

They have a bunch of different types of ink, but three main classes:
1) Silver and Copper Conductive ink: This is all sub milliohm/square
stuff, almost as good as copper for conduction.
2) Carbon Conductive Inks: Made to be used in it's own right, as faraday
cage gasket, printing resisters, etc.
3) Plating Seed Ink : very low conductivity, but enough to attract plating.
The single pass was using the Silver and Copper conductive inks,
that's the one you have to use conductive epoxy on. The two pass was
the seed ink followed by plating, and afterwards you can solder on the
copper, since it's a normal plated board (Dave, we can use the epoxy on
that, too, but don't have to). This is the one I thought would be
useful for the thp folks. Though any of them could be real useful. I
talked to some industrial inkjet head people. They said the big issue
with printing conductive inks through inkjet heads is not clogging, but
keeping the conductor from separating out. For me, that means shaking
the ink cartridge real hard before I use it. I don't think the time it
takes to print a couple of pages will allow significant separation.
They (Ink Jet Technologies) also said the print heads are about $600 a
piece, and their "development kit" is $13,500. The price of that $500
CNC table is looking better and better...
I'm going to try and get a small sample from them and fill my Epson
color 800 with it, and see how well it prints to paper. Not that I want
to put circuits on paper (I'm more a card stock kind of guy, myself,
paper is too flimsy) (well, maybe ok for flex circuits...), but because
I'm too lazy (and too busy) to make it a flat bed first. The stuff is
for water based, fast drying (it's for flexo printing, which is pretty
high speed), very low VOCs and very conductive. They don't have full
product sheets on their inks yet, they are so new, but I do have some
non comprehensive data sheets. If anyone is interested, email me off
line and I'll send them too you.
Richard