My first Toner Transfer 2 side PCB!

[H500]

Finally did a serious attempt at doing a double sided SMT board. I'm very impressed with the results. I won't hesitate to do more complex designs in the future! The traces were 10mil. All vias were 50mil. I plan to drill them when my carbide bits arrive.

The pattern was printed as dark as possible on glossy magazine paper and transferred to the pcb using an unmodified $28 laminator from Walmart. I ran it through 20 times. I'm using a very thin (15mil) pcb.

[epineh]

Nice work, I have been contemplating doing some double sided boards for a while, maybe I had better get to it

Do you have any ideas on tinning? I would like to tin my boards, we use a solder roller setup at the moment, but I would love to get some kind of nickel plating going.

Russell.

[pminmo]

Nice job! Liquid Tin http://shop.willyselectronics.com/browse.cfm/4,7363.htm is about the easiest stuff and does a nice job.

[H500]

I've been manually tinning using a soldering iron, but I might try the liquid one day. I did find that the copper was slightly pitted, causing the solder to not flow as smoothly. I'll try to refine the process more.

This is also the first time I tried copper chloride for etching. The biggest advantage is that the etchant is easily restored with a few drops of 35% hydrogen peroxide, so it last forever. The peroxide was hard to find , but I got it from a specialty health food store for $20/liter.

The etchant is easily made by "dissolving" copper wiring in hydrochloric acid to make a liquid that weighs 1.28 kg/liter. The acid is available from many building supply stores as muriatic acid and cost about $8/gallon.

[integerspin]

How did you align your print's?

I made my first circuit board the other day. I printed it off on door spam[piezza or property advert], I tried a magazine page but it wasn't very sharp. I cut the prints out so I had corners to align but the sides were misaligned. On my board the second side was pretty simple and the missalignment wasn't an issue.

[H500]

How did you align your print's?

I printed cross hairs at 2 diagonal corners. Using a magnifier, I then pushed pins thru the cross centers of each sides. The pin is used to align the layers before glueing.

The magazine paper stretched a bit so one corner was misaligned by about 1mm, but in my case, it doesn't matter since I'm using 50mil vias.