How did you drill the holes?
By hand, with a drill table
The issue that always stops me from taking up toner
transfer PCB
fabrication is drilling the vias. I calculate that my typical 8" X 10"
panel of boards is going to have about 1000 vias on it more or less.
Even if I stack several boards, peg them together and drill them all at
once, that's an awful lot of fine pitch holes to drill by hand.
- Use via minimization
- Try to locate vias in the pins of the components, so you can solder it
on top & bottom, connecting both planes
- Build a cnc machine and make it drill the board for you
- Get the neighborhood's son and tell him you're going to give him a
dollar :) :) ;)
By the time I contemplate, design, and build some kind
of automated hole
drilling machine, I'm back to thinking that paying for fabrication is
cheaper. Getting mil resolution on a mobile drill head is not a simple
task, or so it appears to me.
That is not so hard, it is very common to build machines like this in
Brazil.
Then if I solved the drilling issue, or just buckled
down and did it by
hand, plating the through-holes either involves an intricate and slightly
dangerous (and more importantly, takes up lots of space) copper
electroplating capability or soldering a wire in every via, which is back
to vast tedium. Grommets are too large for the vias I usually want and
also are so expensive it's generally cheaper just to pay for fabrication.
But do you NEED to plate it?
Anyway, solving the drilling and plating issue is what
stops me from home
PCB fabrication.
I do mostly single-sided boards...but when I need a double-sided, I do
and I'm happy with the results :)