Hi alan Knee jerk response is; If you want to use a CO2 laser, the power would have to be a bit higher than if the substrate was a wafer of steel. Shiny copper...
Hi Alan; If you are routing it with something like a Dremel, my guess is you are work hardenering the copper (which work hardens very easily) I know Dremels...
... If they are actually laser drilled, they are drilled by a really high power pulsed laser, YAG I think. The explosive vaporization of the epoxy leaves a...
Danny Miller wrote: Yup, if you've ever had a power circuit burn out violently, it will leave condensed copper vapor on the board, and it is nearly impossible...
Laser drilling of via's is not new, maybe 10 years old. And yes, pulsed Yag. If you look at any compact board from the east, the via's are barely visible. All...
How would you etch a board using EDM? EDM cuts all the way through from the top to bottom. ... [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]...
... There is a machine that does this in air, with an EDM-like process. They use a flexible substrate that is wrapped around a rotating drum, and a wire is...
... Somebody, I thought it was LPKF, had a machine a decade or so ago that worked this way. it had a drum that you wrapped a substrate around. This was a ...
Not necessarily- sometimes it uses an electrode mounted on a Z axis. I think this is called "sinker" EDM. ... From: "Michael Fagan" <woodworker88@...> ...
What do you mean by 'top to bottom'? Electro-Discharge Machining uses spark erosion to remove metal. So you have the board laying flat in some EDM fluid. Then...
The EDM also needs a guarantee of very good electrical contact on the trace. I'm not sure how that'd be guaranteed as the traces are cut and will become...
To inject a small reality check. I print a transparency on my inkjet, expose in a simple UV box. Into the dev tank. Rinse. Into the etch tank. I can make 8...
Yes, okay, that makes sense. I'm familiar with sinker EDM, but I was thrown off by the mention of a wire. Any sort of sinker process would seem to be ...
Likewise Paul- same process and timing but I have only gone down to 10thou- but completely repeatable (and double-sided is equally easy). However, the edm idea...
I personally thought the idea of lasing off a resist was a good one. Visions of spraying bare board with black acrylic then doing the laser equivalent of an...
... If you do it as a raster, then they never get isolated from the other side of the sheet. ... Yup, it takes a separate machine to do the drilling. But, I...
Because they're talking about an EDM, which is a completely different machine which cannot drill. An EDM has never been used for PCB AFAIK. Danny ... [Non-text...
... Because the machine we were talking about had a flexible substrate wrapped around a spinning drum, and the copper was blasted away by a spark from a fine...
... Not a classic EDM, for sure. I've searched on Google and Wikipedia for this machine, which was advertised in the back of industry trade mags about 10...
I've seen that thread, and then Roger disappeared. I think there was never a picture of a board or the machine. No proof. And there's no 'Roger' pursuing the...
But a raster is probably gonna be really, really slow. I mean, if you're making an 8-mil board, you'd need a much step-over than 8 mil to raster it, because...
I looked at that thread. I think "Roger" is blowing smoke. No photos or usable info at all. Why would he do that? Beats me. Some people are just phony. --Phil...
Hmm, EDM in a raster format .. with raster of course being the key ... hmmm Anyway, thanks to all who responded to my original request about laser "etching",...
... I can't vouch for Roger, but there definitely WAS a commercial machine on the market, maybe about 1999 or so, and advertised in trade magazines. It was ...
... If you used steppers, and went Zig, stop, zag, then back again, yes. But, a spinning drum can process a lot of pixels quickly. I have a raster laser ...