Homebrew PCBs

If you want to get into nitty-gritty details and not want to flood the board
with your minute-to-minute observations,  :D  please feel free to email me
directly.  I'm really interested in this process and want to know everything
you learn about it.

I wonder if other 'silver' pens get the same results.  I'm sure I bought a
metallic silver marker from Staples.  I'm going to dig it out and see if
that thing works.

Robert
:)




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.