Advanced Circuits PCB fab

I did some real tiny font stuff there, where my layouter began to feel a bit uneasy about it. Worked.

We do 60 mil character height when we have to. It's usually readable. The board houses seem to have got better at it in the last year or two.

John

Just checked my last super-dense layout. 0.038" character height, my layouter cringed a bit but it came out nicely readable. White on green.

The only thing that causes me trouble is when relatively fine text of

I've used 4pcb.com (Advanced Circuits) for years. Only a few problem boards, and those were ones with no electrical test.

That's funny -- I was just stuffing an AC board last night, and was noticing the even etching, good registration, but the silkscreen looked watered down, like they had over-thinned the ink. I had noticed that kind of thing before, not all of the time, just every now and then. (I send 20 designs/year to them). Maybe I'll mention it to them.

-Jim MacA.

A particularly bad board came in yesterday. I'll send a pic along to Advanced Circuits, and see if we can't get to the bottom of this. Thanks for bringing this up; it's been simmering on my back burner for months.

Can you post here too please. Then I can have something to compare my bad suppliers with. Ta.

Not sure how to post to this group, but I put the image onto my lab's OWL site:

Log in as user/user and browse to the "Misc" folder. There's only one image in there at the moment. Click on the "JPG" icon to the left of the file name to view.

This is about the worst that I've seen from AC. Entire characters are missing. If this had been a production board, I would have sent it back, but it's a prototype, so I let it slide. The rest of the processing is up to AC standards. The characters are 60 mils, with 10 mil line widths, which usually works fine. In fact, a previous run of this same board had flawless silkscreen work.

-Jim

Geez, that's the worst silk screening I've ever seen. What also compounds my gripe with them is that they dropped 8 panels (16 boards per panel) from my last order, destroying 8 boards. They just marked a big "X" on them with a marker and said nothing. They won't be getting anymore business from me.