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

High everyone,
I've just joined your group even though I've been cruising this site
for a while. I'm a member over at cnczone (great site) and I started
a thread there on alternate pcb manufacturing ideas. One of those
ideas was direct printing of pcbs (i.e. a mask) via a flat bed
(gantry) style, solvent based ink jet printer head. Later I was
kindly informed by Ballendo (a member here and at cnczone) that this
and many other ideas had already been discussed here and that I
should visit this site. Since that day I have followed some links
posted here and noticed that direct printing in this manner is
already being tested and shouldn't be too far away before it's a
commercial reality. No doubt the commercial product will cost a
fortune but I was thinking more of a homemade style machine for doing
1 - 25 pcbs at a time. Let's face it, it's only a mono-colour print
head capable of holding either (a) a solvent based ink OR (b) a small
heated reservoir holding laser toner type material (i.e. plastic
based) which technically shouldn't be that difficult.
Idea number 2 that I had was to laminate photo etch material to pcb
and put it under a very low powered, gantry style cnc mounted laser
and used this to expose the photo etch. Then yesterday I was watching
a presentation (Photoshop class) with a digital overhead projector
when it occurred to me the possibility of using that. Most of you
know or have read about homemade LCD projectors so, what if you
change the lens for something that is suitable for close up work?
Remember that an LCD OHP has to use all colours and here all we want
is black and white (i.e. light/no light) and if an LCD OHP can be
viewed with an image at 3m x 2m then surely a resonable resolution
could be had at 150mm x 100mm (6" x 4")? It's probably been tried
before and doesn't work but I just thought I'd ask anyway.
Skippy