Homebrew PCBs

On Wed, 30 Oct 2013 17:16:36 +0000, you wrote:

>The results with a flat iron are too variable which laminator is best ?

You're dealing with three variables, pressure, temperature, and time.

You want enough pressure to make sure the toner transfers well, but
not enough to spread it out.  You want a temperature high enough to
make the toner sticky, but not run, and you want to subject the board
to the above two things long enough to make the whole thing work.

For pressure, that depends in part on the thickness of the boards you
are using.  0.020?  0.030?  0.060?  Some boards do not feed through a
laminator well at that thickness, with the thicker boards being the
worst.  You may have to modify the laminator.

Some laser printers have different toner/fuser temperatures, Brother
has some that are higher temperature and don't work well with the run
of the mill laminators.  A laminator with adjustable temperature may
be a partial solution to that.  Modifying the laminator itself will
be, but you have to consider that the laminator may be too hot for the
case.

time you can fix by running the board through multiple times, which I
think most do.

That said, for an HP 2100 series printer, 0.020 boards (single sided),
and Pulsar paper, I get good results with a little GBC "creative"
laminator.  

Your results can vary.

Harvey



>
>Thanks for any advice.
>
>Doug