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Homebrew Equipment A place to show, design and discuss the weird and wonderful electronic creations from the hands of individual members. |
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5th Nov 2008, 12:31 pm | #1 |
Dekatron
Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: near Reading (and sometimes Torquay)
Posts: 3,099
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PCB printing - which printer to use?
Does anyone know of a printer that can print transparencies where the black is really opaque?
I used to have the luxury of professional plots for printing PCBs thanks to a guy down the road with a real photo-plotter in his garage. Sadly no more. I have tried HP Laserjet-4 making transparencies but the results were not great thanks to thermal distortion (in spite of the special paper) - and now the printer is old and mangy. I recently got an old HP-6122 inkjet (for a project that specifically needed this model) but it's transparencies are not so good - and getting worse by the day thanks to "improved" print drivers and some change to transparency paper. But it was never that good - needing two layers, which isn't very satisfactory. Surely there must be a printer out there that can print photographic quality transparencies? Resolution is no problem these days. The ideal printer would come with a print driver where you can control the quantity of ink laid down and so that you can turn this right up to get a solid black in spite of ending up very wet. |
5th Nov 2008, 12:41 pm | #2 |
Hexode
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Chesterfield, Derbyshire, UK.
Posts: 483
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Re: PCB printing - which printer to use?
I use a very old Digital LN03 laser printer, with this and a lot of the older laser printers you could manually alter the density of toner which is applied.
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5th Nov 2008, 1:21 pm | #3 |
Octode
Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Hampton Vale, Peterborough, UK.
Posts: 1,698
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Re: PCB printing - which printer to use?
Dunno if this low-tech method would meet with your approval, but in my teaching days we made masks by laser-printing onto reasonable quality paper then spraying the paper with WD-40 to allow light to pass through it. When exposed in an ultra-violet light box we obtained perfect exposures - and perfect boards after etching.
Saves a lot of fiddling with transparent medium. -Tony |
6th Nov 2008, 2:38 pm | #4 |
Hexode
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: S.W. London, UK.
Posts: 416
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Re: PCB printing - which printer to use?
If you don’t need track sizes less than 20thou/0.5mm I find just printing on ordinary A4 paper on any laser printer capable of a good bold black works fine for me. Just adjust your UV exposure time to suit. I buy standard pre-sensitised FR4 board from Farnell and give it approx 8 minutes; my UV box has 4 x 15 Watt tubes and a timer that has a maximum period of 500 seconds.(hence 8 minutes!)
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