For some time I have given thought to a method of plating through holes with out going to the expensive process that a comercial house uses. I recently tried an experiment using a conductive ink pen from Radio Shack, I drilled the hole, then injected the conductive ink into the hole until it was well coated, then made sure there was a donut of the conductive ink around the copper on both sides. I then baked the board and checked for resistance. The hole had been sucessfully "plated", resistance was as close to 0 ohms as I could measure with the equipment I have available. The Radio Shack Pen conductive ink pen is essentually silver particles suspended in a carrier that evaporates leaving the silver. Radio Shack states that you can solder on to this conductive ink after baking, so my next experiment will be to plate a hole, and see if it will fill with solder. I am curious to see if this will hold up to repeated thermal cycles as the "real" plated through holes do.
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Plated through holes
2005-05-25 by idaho_huckleberry
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