Homebrew PCBs

--- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "Steve" <alienrelics@y...> 
wrote:
> I just got an Epson 600 from a thrift store a few days ago, got it
> cleaned up and printing perfectly. Next step is to modify it for
> straight through printing.

Re: straight-through printing,

I was in Best Buy the other day and saw some DVD-Rs that said 
something on the package about having a specially prepared surface 
that could be directly printed by inkjet.  This was news to me, so I 
went over to the printer section and sure enough, the Epson Stylus 
Photo R300 (and more expensive R300M) can print directly on a disc!  
A Google search reveals several other machines that can do this too; 
many are specialized devices that *only* print on discs, while
others are general-purpose printers too.  Most of them seem to use a 
special tray to align the discs to the printhead.  Here's one that 
prints up to 6 discs at a time on a tray that feeds *through* the 
printer from back to front:
http://www.datadev.com/rim13c.html

Too bad it's so expensive!  I think in the next couple of years, 
something like this will start to become available used at low cost.  
It looks like the tray could easily be adapted for circuit boards,
no cutting up or modifying the printer case and drive mechanism to 
handle boards.  You could probably buy a replacement tray from the 
manufacturer and keep the disc-printing ability by swapping trays.  
It may be necessary to fiddle with hardware to make a combo paper/
disc printer feed its disc tray even when you tell it you're
printing paper, so you can get full coverage of your board rather 
than just 5 inch circles (I'm sure the built in software is designed 
not to allow printing on the tray itself), but this shouldn't be too 
hard...

A.J.