Homebrew PCBs

I drilled the hole with a regular through the board IC pin sized drill 
bit (sorry, I an away from home and don't have the drill size handy), 
then used the pen to squeeze some of the silver ink into the hole, 
making sure that it pushed through to the other side. The donut was 
just getting the silver ink on the surface pad to make sure there was a 
good connection from the pad to the silver in the hole, then on to the 
pad on the opposite side.

I have not been able to try soldering on it yet to see if it will take 
solder, though the instructions on the solder pen indicate that it can 
be soldered to if the board is baked to cure the silver in place.

I looked into the comercial plating through the holes once and decided 
that was not the way to go if one only needed to make a few boards now 
and then. The information I had indicated that there was some sort of 
Paladium coating that needed to be applied to the holes, then several 
other plating steps that I deamed were beyond the reach of my home brew 
budget/capability.

--- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, JanRwl@A... wrote:
> What I'd like to know about this "silver ink pen" is, does 
the "donut" over  
> the copper pads SOLDER-over?  Does the solder "wick" down-in, around 
the  
> lead-wire?  That is, if a pad of a via with NO lead-wire that is, 
say,  under a 
> 0.6 in. wide IC, is it as metallurgically-bonded to the  "solder-
accessible 
> side" as a pad that is accessible/solderable "on top", as  
well??????  Jan Rowland
> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]