Homebrew PCBs

Has anyone experiemented with wax ribbon printers?  I didnt see 
anything so far, in my searches.

I've been trying with progress for a few months now.  

I bought an eltron/zebra shipping printer, which is basically a 
thermal print-head that heats up to rastorize the image (just like an 
old-fashioned fax machine).

The premium thermal printers use wax, wax/resin, or resin ribbons.  
And normal direct thermal printers will also work if you run the 
ribbon above the paper (or whatever your trying to print to) - the 
head heats the ribbon, melts the wax and the pressure rollers 
transfer the image to the surface material.

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So when I hacked the printer apart, and sandwitched the ribbon, I 
found the same problem with the inkjet printing methods - the board 
must be HEATED in order for the thermal wax to transfer.  This 
normally happens 100% with thin paper, as the thermal head produces 
enough heat to heat the paper, but not a copper board.

The difference would definately be the speed - as a thermal transfer 
printer, at its slowest speed will run easily fast enough to feed a 
heated copper board thru the rollers (which I have yet to test).

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On my earlier tests, I mounted a 980nm / 350 ma laser diode to my cnc 
x/y/z table (normally used for milling).  With the bare copper board 
in the work area laying nicely ontop of a kitchen hot-plate, I was 
able to rastorize a circuit board with a wax-ribbon taped to the 
surface of the copper board.  Unfortunately, the heat from the 
hotplate varied so much, it ended up melting ALL the wax to the 
board, or not enough to make it work.  I stopped testing this, 
because as I have found, in order to properly activate the thermal 
ribbons, PRESSURE is needed to tranfer the wax on the ribbon to the 
copper board.

Some light documented results of my laser / thermal transfer tests 
can be found here:

http://www.raidgear.net/rnd_laser.aspx