Homebrew PCBs

Phil,

Glad you found my post useful.

I, too, have switched to using pages from Australian Aviation
magazine. I had a copy of it laying around the house and decided to
give it a go one day. I was very impressed by the consistency of the
results.

I've been making a few boards today and have generally had good
results. I did run into trouble with a larger board (120x120mm),
however. I used the laminator to fuse the toner but the toner didn't
adhere well in the centre of the board. I think that the problem must
have been that the board cooled too much between each sucessive run
through the laminator. My previous boards have been up to about 60mm
wide, so they feed through in half the time and tend to loose less
heat between passes.

On the second try, I just gave the board an iron for a minute or two,
after the laminator passes. This did the trick and not a pad or track
is missing.

I think that modifying the laminator to run slower would solve this
problem, and allow boards to be fused in a single pass. I am thinking
about pulling mine apart and replacing the existing motor (which I
think is probably a low RPM AC motor) with a little hobby motor and
gearbox (such as Jaycar YG-2730). But I am not very mechanically
minded, so the end result might be a bricked laminator!

Cheers,

Luc