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Machinable SMT stencil material?

2013-07-20 by ohmware

My SMT adventures continue... I am making some promising progress, but I have discovered that the bronze sheets I am using to make stencils are destroying my tools! Cutting out one stencil for a small DCDC converter layout left my almost-new V60 tool unusably dull.

The bronze sheets would be fine, I think, for larger pitch components where you can simply do a through-cut with a small end-mill. But my smallest end-mill is 0.02" and that's too large to stencil the pads for the 0.65mm pitch IC I am using.

Has anyone used an alternative material for machining SMT stencils?

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