On Wednesday 28 April 2004 02:42 am, Alan J. Franzman wrote:
> --- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "Steve" <alienrelics@y...>
> > wrote:
> > I just got an Epson 600 from a thrift store a few days ago, got it
> > cleaned up and printing perfectly. Next step is to modify it for
> > straight through printing.
>
> Re: straight-through printing,
>
> I was in Best Buy the other day and saw some DVD-Rs that said
> something on the package about having a specially prepared surface
> that could be directly printed by inkjet. This was news to me, so I
> went over to the printer section and sure enough, the Epson Stylus
> Photo R300 (and more expensive R300M) can print directly on a disc!
> A Google search reveals several other machines that can do this too;
> many are specialized devices that ∗only∗ print on discs, while
> others are general-purpose printers too. Most of them seem to use a
> special tray to align the discs to the printhead. Here's one that
> prints up to 6 discs at a time on a tray that feeds ∗through∗ the
> printer from back to front:
> http://www.datadev.com/rim13c.html
>
> Too bad it's so expensive! I think in the next couple of years,
> something like this will start to become available used at low cost.
> It looks like the tray could easily be adapted for circuit boards,
> no cutting up or modifying the printer case and drive mechanism to
> handle boards. You could probably buy a replacement tray from the
> manufacturer and keep the disc-printing ability by swapping trays.
> It may be necessary to fiddle with hardware to make a combo paper/
> disc printer feed its disc tray even when you tell it you're
> printing paper, so you can get full coverage of your board rather
> than just 5 inch circles (I'm sure the built in software is designed
> not to allow printing on the tray itself), but this shouldn't be too
> hard...
This reminds me of why one of the numerous dot-matrix printers I've used was
my favorite -- the Oki 92 I still have. Not only was it a fairly good
performer in general, it also had the ability to do a "straight-through"
paper path as you describe, only vertically. This made it handy for such
things as post cards, etc. It wasn't the only one that I've used that had
this capability, but I can't remember what others were.
Now I'm wondering if it's possible to use hardware designed to handle fanfold
paper to deal with boards. :-)I sure have enough of that sort of hardware
around, from scrapping printers out, and adapting this to work would give
you one axis of a CNC setup. Maybe some sort of a "carrier" would work?