cheap ways to make PCBs

[arma61]

That's really great - did you use a plain Sharpie or is it a special pen?

Yes, it's a special pen for PCB, ink is very dense and 99% cover in one coat if you draw it slowly.

here's another example again with 1 IC , it's a YJM308, if you have a little bit of drawing skill (not like me  ) then you can do very good job



Just get the right carbon copypaper(?), the one for hand use not machine use

..  and don't forget to print your art-work reversed!!   

[Mark Hammer]

1) Laser printers ARE cheap....ridiculously so, when I think about the 9-pin dot matrix that cost me $500 in 1982.

2) Press-n-peel is often unfamiliar to copy shop staff so they balk.  Inform them that it is standard acetate overhead sheets with an emulsion/copating that will not come off in their photocopier.  If the photocopier will do overhead transparencies, then it is 100% safe.

3) Many photocopy shops will carry glossy photopaper, sometimes better quality than what you can find in a stationery or office supply store.  If you bring a sheet that has inkjet-printed layouts all nicely and neatly arranged so that a bunch are crammed on a single letter-sized page and taped in place, they can transfer that to a decent sheet of photo paper for cheap.

4) I did my PCBs with resist pens for years, decades actually, until toner transfer came along.  My best friend was a spring-loaded centre-punch.  I would tape the layout to the copper side of the board, and pop dimples into the centre of each pad, and then "connect the dots".  I started out with Sharpies, but they clog up easily and were never fine enough for my liking. I eventually switched to Staedtler Lumocolor pens, because they come in fine tips.  I would use two colours.  A lighter colour (like red or green) for the first go around, and then a darker colour (like black or blue) to go over it.  The advantage of two different colours is that you can easily see where you have and haven't applied two coats.  The hardest part of doing boards this way is keeping your stinking hands off the board so that it doesn't get your "finger juice" on it.  Finger juice is the bane of ALL etching since it tarnishes the board and impairs the etching process.

[maarten]

Edding pens, numbers 780, 404,  or 3000 are especially made for etching; Edding 400 is also suitable.
Maarten

[Paul Marossy]

I've etched boards that way in the past. Regular Sharpie markers work fine. But you have to make sure that it goes on thick, or the etchant will eat thru any spot not covered very well with the marker.

I once did the power distribution and about half the logic traces of a clone of the Apple II this way. My eyes are still slightly crossed.

Worked, too. 

Wow. 

[R.G.]

I once did the power distribution and about half the logic traces of a clone of the Apple II this way. My eyes are still slightly crossed.
Worked, too. 

Wow. 

That's *exactly* what I thought... wow! It worked! 

[amptramp]

A long time ago, I had a job where I had to get rubber stamps made for symbols to go on fluorescent lights.  It cost about $50 in 1971 Canadian dollars for several of them.  Does anyone have any connections to a rubber stamp manufacturer?  It would be nice to just get a piece of board, take a stamp and load it with some form of resist (printer's ink is a possibility) and just stamp the bare piece of copper-clad wherever you want your circuit.

Similarly, at a later date, I saw examples of resist printing for vacuum deposition that was done with an offset printer.  The same image was superimposed four times in order to get complete ink coverage and the lines were reliable at 8 microns, had a reasonable yield at 6 microns and sometimes worked at 4 microns.  The person who was doing this was Dr. T. Peter Brody, the man who coined the phrase "active matrix" as it applies to displays.

I have also thought of a technique of using rubber cement as a resist and stripping unwanted copper with a sandblaster. No fuss, no muss, no etchant. You could make a shield like an old erasing shield as a template, slap on the rubber cement, sandblast and remove the rubber cement.  Or simply make a hard template and just sandblast away.  You can stop at any time to examine the work and hit stubborn areas a little longer.

There has to be a better way than hoping you can get toner to do what it was never designed to do.

[deadastronaut]

maplin does a conductive pen!....just a thought!...pricey though...rob.