Homebrew PCBs

Hi,

    I contacted Rod Grantham of www.granthams.com who sells a uv 
curable pattern resin. I thought that there might be a chance that 
one could use a plotter to draw the lines on the copper and when done 
expose the board to uv to set the resin. I recieve the following 
reply and thought that his info might be valuable to those of you 
working on this problem. I am going to see if I can locate some of 
the ink he mentions and give it a try.

Jack




Hello Jack

Using the pattern resin for a resist will not work. The resin
is about the consistency of honey and would not flow
thorough a plotter pen.

We have made a printing plate with the 40 durometer resin
and printed directly on copper clad boards. Using rubber base
ink in our letterpress and etching with feric chloride works
great. It's only practical for 20 boards or more.

Some of the transfer methods, like PNP that use a print
from a laser that is heat transfered to the copper clad
board with a dry mounting press is something for you to consider
if your traces are quite bold.

The ink used for screen printing circuit boards might
work in your plotter pen. Nazdar makes an ink formulated
just for what you are trying to do. Although any poster ink
would likely work. It's someting for you to think about.

That's about all the help I can offer.

Rod Grantham
www.granthams.com

On Sun, 14 Mar 2004 21:02:15 -0000, jackafaz <greeneaz@...> 
wrote:

> Hi,
>
>     I contacted Rod Grantham of www.granthams.com who sells a uv
> curable pattern resin. I thought that there might be a chance that
> one could use a plotter to draw the lines on the copper and when done
> expose the board to uv to set the resin. I recieve the following
> reply and thought that his info might be valuable to those of you
> working on this problem. I am going to see if I can locate some of
> the ink he mentions and give it a try.
>
> Jack
>

Even if you get rid of all the problems with the pen and the ink
and the line width and the layer thickness the plotting is still very,
very slow.
(i mean really slow).

I also could not manage to plot a pcb with the holes in the pads
open (for centering the drill) which quite annoyed me...

I tried it for a while, and was not satisfied, not at all.
TT delivers better results much faster and easier for me.

The plotter is still a good choice for component legend.
(But i did not yet bring my libs up to it and i also don't require
it for my own boards...
- after all it adds not much functionality to the circuit itself ;-) )


ST