Hi guys, sorry that i have not kept up to date with my toner transfer testing but i believe that i have found a great method that seems to work for me quite well. I had been attempting transfers using hp matte and glosy paper but the toner would not stick to the glossy paper through the printer so it was a good job that i used a backing sheet of normal paper to pick up any mess stuck on the fuser. Toner stuck to the matte paper but a white crusty substance would be transfered onto the copper whenever i ironed the paper onto the copper. I think this was possily clay from the paper coating. Well, I recently bought a cheapo laminator and disassembled it to see what needed to be done for pcb use. Basically, the pcb and paper would fit through the pair of silicone coated rollers with them bending to take the thickness but the flexibility of the silicone ensured that complete contact was still made. The motor was useless plastic-geared hunk-o-junk and the elements were not safe so i stripped them out and currently use a variable temp hot air gun and manually feed the laminator and worked very well, much better than i could achieve with the iron. I just needed to sort out a decent paper, I was going to buy some pressnpeel when i fuond a magazine that was about to be chucked away and i thought why not... Well, I printed out a test circuit but some toner was literally hanging off the page and the fuser had one or two 'loop' images from excess toner, failiure until i remembered that the printer was set to darkest '5' and transparencies, so i set these to back to normal and tried another sheet...success, printout great...then, being lazy, i thought about how can i test the transfer properties without having to clean another board...so i scratched at the toner with my fingernail. It released quite easily and it removed the ink from ontop of the magazine paper but did not tear the paper..great i thought. Time for a proper test... Printed out another sample, used my laminator and heat gun and attempted to transfer the toner...it worked very well. I could lift the paper from the board leaving 90% of the toner behind without soaking and with soaking, all of the toner remained on the copper. The paper works so well that the sheet ends up having a nice paper- white image left where the toner was printed onto the magazine page. I suppose what i am trying to say (if this email wasn't long enough already) is that if you can cleanly scratch the toner from the paper and it removes only the paper coating *under* the toner then chances are it will work for toner transfer. The magazine paper worked so well that i ran into problems of the toner actually spreading out under pressure for the first time, indicating either too much pressure from the laminator or too mch toner on the paper... Anyway, up to this point, i have to thank all you guys for talking about your different toner transfer techniques for giving me inspiration on what to try next...hopefully my magazine publishers won't change their paper supplies;-) PK
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RE: Toner Transfer Success
2006-06-10 by onenastyviper
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