24 Oct
1999
24 Oct
'99
5:38 a.m.
On Oct 23, 19:15, Tony Duell wrote:
We found that toner didn't stick that well to
acetate film, and that we
often ended up with gaps in tracks, etc. Amazingly, printing onto _paper_
and giving it a very long exposure in the UV box helped a lot. Sounds
crazy, but I've got the boards to prove it :-)
I find drafting film is best - but make sure you get the type that
withstands the heat of a laserprinter or photocopier :-)
Many components can be soldered on both sides
(Turned-pin IC sockets help
here, but I use nothing else anyway). For those that can't I use the
proper track pins. The PTH 'repair' kits are out of this world when it
comes to prices...
I don't like soldering components on both sides, because it makes
modifications/repairs harder later. For special purposes, I do sometimes
use pins extracted from turned-pin sockets, though, and I don't mind
soldering those on both sides.
There's always the good old HP plotter with a
metal-tipped pen onto film.
Takes a bit of fiddling, and it's slow, but it works. And it's a _lot_
cheaper to find an old HP A3 (or larger) plotter than a similar
laserprinter.
I forgot about that one -- silly, because in a previous job, we used to do
that quite a lot.
For small board (<A4), a laserprinter seems to be
the way to go for the
hobbyist. Pick up an old CX or SX engined machine and rebuild it (this
_is_ classiccmp, after all) :-)...
Yup. And the older engines often seem to be better for this sort of
purpose than the newer ones.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York