Pirated Press N Peel for Making PCB's

Not everybody is making a thousand bucks an hour.

Thanks, Rich

You not only need the right paper, you also need the right laserprinter. I once had succes using some inkjet paper and a Laserjet 5000. My own Laserjet

4Si and some other laserprinters I could lay my hands on, do not provide enough toner to cover the black parts.

petrus bitbyter

With materials cost and aquisition time, setup, cleanup, and the time it takes to drill the holes, and no allowance for mistakes, can you really get it done in less than four hours?

I'd be suprised if there are many people with the skills to design a PCB who are not earning at least $10/hour. The exceptions might be teenage hobbyists... which was the last time I did much etching.

DJ, don't mudwrestle with the pig. You get all dirty and the pig likes it.

Jim

It is trivial. You make a black toner topside mask the same way you make a black bottomside resist pattern. You iron it onto the fiberglass AFTER the etch.

Jim

Won't it melt when you solder it? I mean, if it worked, you could do a multi-color mask and get the silkscreen at the same time.

The inkjet masks are heat resistant.

Someone who grosses $10/hr nets only half that after overhead and taxes, and so could spend eight hours paying for a one-hour job.

I home-brew small, simple boards sometimes for fun, but mostly for the quick turnaround. For ultra-simple surface mount stuff you just can't beat it.

Best, James Arthur

Of late I've started using the "float" technique, learned from John Popelish. Just float the board on the warm FeCl etchant, and do NOT agitate. Convection delivers fresh etchant upward to the board, while the denser, spent etchant drops downward.

Much slower than the sponge method (e.g. 12 minutes instead of 4), but it etches much more vertical walls (curing undercutting problems), and proceeds unattended--you don't have to be there.

Best, James Arthur

Only if you've got a color laser printer. Why would it melt? You are soldering on the farside and the mask is on the nearside.

Jim

FeCl to me has 2 disadvantages: first it stains and is "dirty", Acid & Peroxide are clear and colorless. Second FeCl is comparatively expensive. Cement bleach is around $1.50 a bottle and Peroxide is $3.00 a bottle. Since the ration is 2:1 I keep 2 bottles of Peroxide along with my bottle of bleach (besides, Peroxide is also useful as a disinfectant). I'm still using the first set of bottles I've bought last year. Though I don't do much etching.

If I do a lot of etching I would have made a bubble tank. Not to speed up etching but to "regenerate" the etchant with oxygen (actually a different etchant: CuCl but derived from HCl + Cu while etching) - saving me even more money. But preparing a solution which can be regenerated requires more accurate chemistry than my simple 2:1 mix, just can't be bothered doing it at the quantities I'm consuming. Professional/Industrial PCB shops use CuCl.

My boards are mostly SMD so the soldering is done on the nearside.

What's the point of having soldermask on the side you're not soldering on? Or are you thinking of silkscreen?

Sorry, I thought you knew that I was referring to the screen legend.

Jim

Careful, many color laser printers use wax instead of toner.

--
Ben Jackson AD7GD

http://www.ben.com/

Wrong, unless they are self-employed. Someone earning that little is in a fairly low tax bracket.

$10/hr. 2080 hours year. $20800 pays about $1500 in federal income tax.

SS/Medicare still seems to be at 7.5% so thats 1560

Lets say you are in Taxachusetts and pay maybe 6% after SS/Medicare - $1200 (but it's actually better as you can deduct half of your rent)

And they probably don't have health insurance at that pay rate...

So they are effectively taking home about $8 per hour. If it's a kid with a part time job, they don't get the personal exemption, but they probably don't have anythere near full time income, so they would pay even less tax.

But that assumes that a work hour and a hobby hour are interchangeable

- which of course they aren't if you are working full time. From one perspective, working 40 hours a week you probably can't afford to buy the PCB and have to make it yourself. On the other hand, if the choice is between making the PCB yourself and working some optional overtime, now you are comparing to a pay rate of $15/hour ($12 after taxes)

Mine (HP CLJ 2550) seems to use toner for the colors. At least, it looks like toner under the microscope and toner transfer paper works just fine with it.

Yes, I know the tax rates better than I'd like! You omit overhead, including the time spent preparing for and commuting to work, and a bunch of other stuff, which I submit brings the matter close to where I proposed. Two daily hours of preparation and commuting and what-not yields n=80% for starters. Then subtract taxes, etc.

Even more telling is when _disposable_ income is considered (a more proper comparison)--money left over after rent and expenses. High-earners lose lots of their excess to taxes, low-earners don't have as much left over to spend.

For either case--rich or poor--it's easy to spend a lot more time buying something than you thought.

In the end, it's only really worth employing someone if they can do it better/faster/cheaper than you can. If they can, go for it !

I wouldn't think of making a big nasty board myself, but last weekend I whipped out an 8-transistor, smd, microwatt, picofarad capacitance-sensor in half an hour with a bit of circuit board and an etch resist pen. What's not to like about that?

Best, James Arthur

Sure, but with most of my projects I just need 1 PCB. I don't make enough stuff to group several different board designs onto a single larger panel. Sometime I even break out the ol' Sharpie to make a quick & dirty little PCB :-)

BTW - sorry about the multiple posts - Google went a bit screwy on me.

Arch

You do know that you can delete the duplicates, don't you?

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

I could not figure out how to remove them using this "Google Groups" account - love to learn how if there's a way. Thanks, Arch