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

For some time I have given thought to a method of plating through holes
with out going to the expensive process that a comercial house uses.
I recently tried an experiment using a conductive ink pen from Radio
Shack, I drilled the hole, then injected the conductive ink into the
hole until it was well coated, then made sure there was a donut of the
conductive ink around the copper on both sides. I then baked the board
and checked for resistance. The hole had been sucessfully "plated",
resistance was as close to 0 ohms as I could measure with the equipment
I have available.

The Radio Shack Pen conductive ink pen is essentually silver particles
suspended in a carrier that evaporates leaving the silver.

Radio Shack states that you can solder on to this conductive ink after
baking, so my next experiment will be to plate a hole, and see if it
will fill with solder.

I am curious to see if this will hold up to repeated thermal cycles as
the "real" plated through holes do.