OT: how big would it be? - PCBs at home

<Has any of you ever encountered an approach to this that could be managed i <the home environment with equipment costing, nominally, less that a k-buck Being close to doing this I can speak about it some. The key to doing plated through hole is a process called electroless copper plating. I don't do that for one reason, it's a nasty process and the materials are poison and its wastes are poison to the max. I farm it out. the films for high res stuff are gerber photoplots you can farm that work out. laser printer plots are not adaquate for anything less than 25mil features and even then... At work we pay 87$ to get B size plots from Acad-13. This is not cheap and is likely the upper end as I get them elsewhere for ~20 for A size. the drilling, it's possible to build a threeaxis drill press that is NC controlled with better than 0.005 accuracy with relative ease. that will drill for you. With patience and a simple jig in a drillpress you can do this by hand. Sensitizing, exposure and development are trivial. the photoresist can be very expensive though. They run from 300 to 800 USD a gallon (that a lot) and getting a pint quanity can be hard. The easy way is to pour on the resist (under safelight) and spin the board at 3000rpm for 20 sec. The coat is very uniform then and quite thin. Exposure is a light box with two UV lamps of adaquate size(20w, 2ft, shortwave). Development is generally whatever the resist requries and takes a few minutes. htere are positive resists and also negative, pick the right one to match your photoplots (or pick the photoplots to match the resist)! Etching the board is simple and can be handled by most hobbiests. <or two and achieving nominally 10-mil traces with 8-10 mil separation or <anything close to that? How about a dry-film solder mask? Dry film mask may be part of the resist used or a seperate operation. It's not essential but it helps. A z280 board under devlopment using 10 mil features, two sided with PTH is what I'm basing my experince on. Also the company I work for does foil heaters and temperature sensors so the have a minimal PCB operation (no drilling, single sided, no PTH). Allison