another hack

Nice-- what bit do you use in the dremel?

Well it looks like you don't have much inductance in your foils, might be a lright :-)

So you did that by hand, nice. I don't have that steady of a hand or the ey esight anymore. I do however have one of those Grizzly mini vertical mills. I could stick an end cutting endmill in there and do it that way. Then cha nge the bit and drill holes if I use anything through hole. Thing is I got nothing on my mind right now, you guys got contracts and whatever. I do hav e one idea but have not even started to put it to paper because I just star ted gainful (well almost lol in this economy) recently.

Now conversely, if someone wanted a dealio like the mini mill, all you real ly need is a tabletop drill press and a cross slide vise. Make some sort of thing to help work the lever, like so you can use both hands on the cranks . Maybe take the spring out and make the spring load push instead of pull i t up. Then you manually disengage it, and you have some sort of shim or som ething in there so you can relocate the bit.

I almost decided to sell that mini mill and saw the prices were not all tha t low. Turns out there is a CNC kit for that model.

Now there's an idea, just draw it up in a graphics program and convert it t o whatever code the thing takes. I think alot of stuff takes what's called Gcode.

Anyway, I have to say that for doing it by hand that looks FANTASTIC ! I ha d to reread the OP where it says about your hand aching to get it through m y head that it was done by hand. I don't see how the hell you get the lines so straight.

Bet you guys who do these would make damn good welders.

On Tue, 08 Dec 2015 21:43:30 -0800, John Larkin Gave us:

Where are you finding gold over nickel bare clad proto stock at?

On Tue, 08 Dec 2015 22:30:04 -0800, artie Gave us:

I would use the little concrete cutter disc.

Looks really nice- especially for freehand and blown up in size. Electronics prototyping is getting closer and closer to jewelery making.

There are a bunch of Dremel/Foredom etc. accessories for inlay work, routing/tile cutting etc. I wonder if one of those might make it even nicer and reduce cramping.

Just found this one.. $$$$ but looks like it might be nice. Maybe too big.

--sp

The spindle RPM is probably woefully inadequate- maybe by 10:1. Sherline has a 10,000 RPM spindle available which is still not that great.

The Indian-made cross slide vises are horrible compared to your Chinese mill- backlash is enormous.

Draw it on quadrille (sp?) paper and hand code it!

--sp

John had a thread on that fairly recently- he had it custom made.

I notice that the proto board manufacturers have a disclaimer on the online pricing limiting the % of board area that is gold plated (15% or something) or the price goes up (and up).

--sp

Hello John, I'm too old for drilling, smashinf ... with a dremel ... possibly you could get inspired by this :

... and linuxcnc of course.

Habib

Glass fiber all over a milling machine ways is not nice.

You know this might be a useful application for one of those ~ $1K Chinese engraver machines, assuming they can read G-code.**

G-code for rapids and simple linear cuts and moves with a spade bit is trivial.. more or less just list the corner points with a few codes thrown in.

This one, for example, claims to have ball screws in all 3 axis and has an 11,500 RPM max spindle speed. Light duty ways and aluminum are fine for engraving.

--sp

uld get inspired by this :

Not much worse as drilling by hand .. and huffing ...

SolI

On Wednesday, December 9, 2015 at 8:43:08 AM UTC-5, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wro te:

could get inspired by this :

No, the fiber glass is abrasive, and if it gets into the ways of the mill, (the ways are the nicely machined/ground surfaces that the beds ride on.) it wears them down as you move the mill around. That's bad according to machinists...

George H.

One cap missed and maybe the middle leg of a three terminal device just above it.

George H.

Carbide dental burr, cheap on ebay.

With a little practise, or maybe a lot of practise by now, it looks like I can handle 0603s and SOT23s pretty well.

I should try SO8s. That would be close to the limits with this tool.

On Wed, 09 Dec 2015 07:23:34 -0800, John Larkin Gave us:

You should try the 1" or so "concrete saw" fiber discs for the longer straight runs. It would cut your fab time by a huge amount and make a lot smoother cuts too.

I can't believe that you are using a burr. That must be a long, slow PITA to do.

I've done SC70s by putting nylon washers in between three of the skinny emery cutoff wheels on the same arbor. Of course there was a BFP640 in there, and it oscillated at 14 GHz. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I have it made by Cirexx. $100 per square foot, ENIG both sides. A square foot lasts a long time, since most protos are small.

The gold doesn't tarnish like bare copper does.

Plus it gives the customer the right idea about the price point. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I wonder how that would work on copperclad.

I did the "layout" in PADS, no schematic, just pushed parts around in ECO mode. I got tired of using pencils and erasers. Then I dremel'd the FR4 freehand in that pattern.

What would be cool would be a cutting pantograph, 4:1 reduction maybe. I could then trace a sketch or a printed layout.

We had one of those PCB milling machines, but it was a hassle to use. We've done a little PCB milling on the Tormach, but that's a hassle too. I can grab the Dremel and go.

This sort of breadboarding works fine at, say, 100 ps speeds, limited mainly by the cutting resolution for tiny parts.

That's nice, but it needs a lot of setup. I can grab the Dremel and go. The next step might be to just jump to a real layout and a real plated-thru board from a fast-turn board house. That would take a few days at least.