Hey John... Mill your protos with this...

Something wrong such as having customers?

What are the limitations of milling that would require a redu? Let's face it, that is some rank BS!

The point is on the road to producing a custom design that will be made the traditional way, being able to spin a board in a day is a pretty big advantage. If a customer only needs a small number of custom units, even moreso. Talking like this machine has no value because it is of no value to YOU is BS. There are places that specialize in custom designs on tight schedules.

I've wondered why there have been no services springing up that provides milled PCBs and 3D printing as a rapid turn around service capability. I think UPS announced a 3D printing service some time back, but they still only have 20 stores that offer it across the US. The milled PCB setup is so much lower capital that it can be done on a much more local level reducing shipping hassles. You can get traditional PCBs in a day, but they get very pricey not to mention the shipping costs. I do see other 3D printing services available. So maybe it is a growing business and it's just a matter of time. I recall some 20 years ago when 3D printing was still very new a company I worked for had some prototypes made that way. At the time they were still fairly grainy.

Since the main use for such mills is usually 1 or 2 off pcb's for hobbyists speculation about quantity probably dosent come into it but levelling is important if a "v" bit is used since the gap left will vary according to depth and if the clearance is small it matters a lot. The warping of the board can be caused by the clamping method or just the board itself, the auto levelling cnc I use gives a map of the levels as it goes along and usually I see variations at least the thickness of the copper. So to me levelling is essential for small clearance milling. It can be eliminated using a straight sided cutter but say a 0.2mm is very fragile and usually ends up broken or taking hours to complete.

instead of watching a heavily condensed advertising video I suggest you actually try milling a pcb

What does your comment have to do with what I was saying???

Why does an ad have ads?

snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

I did. You ignored the post, as usual.

You are fake.

I can't find a link to your board. Can you post it again?

Adception?

Addition?

There's a 'plus size' ladies' wear chain in Canada called "Addition Elle"

"More to love" is the concept.

There's someone for everyone. Nature provides.

Not being one of the Jedi-level magicians in the business, I'm not ashamed to admit that I rely on prototyping to an unhealthy extent. I also have a bad habit of using parts to do things their data sheets don't anticipate, which compounds the need to try before I buy. I'd be a good customer for a service like that, in principle.

However, when I *do* need to prototype something, it's either simple enough to dead-bug on bare copper, or it's complex enough to need 4+ layers and small feature sizes that the domestic board houses consider HDI processes. As a result, the boards I work with are either free to build on my bench or death-defyingly expensive to manufacture in the US. There doesn't seem to be a middle ground where the service you're talking about could fit into my workflow.

So I end up relying on low-cost Asian board houses, again to an unhealthy extent. If that particular free lunch ever goes away, I don't see a CNC-based process that can replace it. It would be great if people were doing what you suggest, especially at the local level, but IMHO it's a non-starter if they can't fab multilayer PCBs with 4-mil features, which they can't.

-- john, KE5FX

In my case, the "hard stuff" can often be purchased as a module (e.g, CPU, RAM, DATAC, etc.). So, the only stuff necessary to add is popcorn parts and typically only for proof of principle; discard the setup once you know it

Agreed. And, then there's the assembly aspect...

For small jobs (one off), I rely on friends with in-house capabilities. Likewise for assembly.

But, that's a favor that you (I) don't want to abuse. So, I reserve it for things that I *really* need to prototype-in-foil but don't want to commit to buying hundreds (which is a more typical prototyping quantity, for me).

We push parts beyond specs, or to places where there are no specs. It's a calculated risk.

We don't prototype actual products, but we do prototype tricky subcircuits. We accumulate a list of interesting things to try, and the next time we have an immediate need we lay out a multi-experiment

I have a lot of these. They started at Z100.

Be careful about asian stackups. They can be very weird.

A good customer of mine got bitten by that very bug. "I can't see a single thing wrong with this board. See if you can find our missing 10 dB?"

-- john, KE5FX