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

I am trying to produce my first double-sided board and it is not a
simple one. Now I have encountered similar problems as Susan some
posts above. I have four laser and led printers at my disposal, and
when making single-sided boards never had problems. But now I found
out that two of them distort the layout so that pads and vias do not
line up any more on the printed transparency. So I tried two more
printers I had never used for this before and found that one of them
has a perfect quality but the heater is obviously a bit too hot and
warps the transparency slightly. I tried but was not able to squeeze
the foil flat on the pcb so that some traces were gone after exposure.
The fourth printer has almost no distortion but is an older one and
has a print quality which makes it unusable. How did others solve this
problem? I am not planning to buy a new printer, but in case there is
a particular model which is good and available used I might look for
one.

Regards
Martin

BTW these four printers are Xerox WorkCentre XD102, Lexmark Optra E+
(both distortion), Brother HL-1230 (heater) and Oki Okipage 4w
(quality).