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

I did plotting on copper. It was an amdek plotter with a program
somone wrote in Pascal and it used to be avaialble free on internet.
It all worked fine but first it took a very long time to plot and
second, towards teh end of plot the holder must have gotten tired of
holding a pen and dropped it. Overal I was not happy with quality nd
all kinds of problems. That was a pen plotter.

The second experiment was to use a regular inkjet printer. I rigged
up a printer and it was nicely feeding a PCB. I printed with
standard ink and it printed nicely except for it was a water soluable
ink. I kept changing inks, all that ammonia stuff and the printhead
died. The nice thing is that I chose a printer with a printhead in
the ink cartridge. I dropped the project due to lack of etch
resisting ink.

Then I tried copper milling- too much of everything, noise, dust,
headache.

Then I tried a scratch method in a plotter. It scratched nicely but
the scratches were too thin for the etchant.

Then I started coating my own boards with foil and I saw beautiful
patterns after UV exposure/etch. it was awsome.

Then I tried a TT with a hand iron and that turned out to be a pile
of manure. I could never get the right conditions.

Then I tried TT with HC200 and Staples paper and I stopped making UV
exposure boards because it turned out so nicely and QUICK.

Then I got a commercial laminator and it laminates awsome boards.

Then I tried the www.pulsar.gs TT paper and I said WOW! Never seen
anything like that. That paper flies off the PCB like a flea off a
dog. Mike