Homebrew PCBs

Suske,

With the chemistry from Bungard it's like this:
Bath #1, #4,#5 are "on their own". That said you must mix each of them 
according to the information you get along with it. Typically you have 
to mix one to three different fluids togeher, add some distilated water 
to come to the right mix. Bungard gives the quantites of each component 
in relation to their "Compacta 30" station in liters of it's size which 
if I remember right is using 15l tanks (alas way too much for our 
typical use). You therefore divide each component by 15 and multiply 
acording to the amount of liters you want to end up with.

Bath #2 and #3 are almost identical. It's the so called "Predip" and an 
identical bath with the difference that there you also add the 
Activator. So for a tank in my size ( 2.2 liters) bath #3 consists of 
2.1 liters of predip, and 0.1 liters of the activator. Out of this you 
see that you can make a new bath #3 five times up until you have used up 
all of the activator. If you now consider that - provided you treat it 
propperly - you can keep such a bath for multiple years..... While we 
are at it, the predip's purpose is actually only to aclimate the PCB to 
the next bath (the activator). In other words the purpose is to protect 
the expensive activator from being contaminated by bath #1 or reminders 
from the rinsing. That's also the reason why the run time for bath #2 is 
only one minute.

The predip is deliverd in 25 litter containers, same is true for the 
copper soultion. From the first - as you could see above you would use 
4.3 liters (2.2 and 2.1) initially and each time you do the baths new. 
Again, this would last for about five complete fillings. The situation 
is simillar with the other baths.

So, if you buy the Bungard chemistry once, you are probably done for a 
fairly long time unless you really produce many many square meters of 
PBCs per year or treat it bad. You definately should look at it like an 
investment. The main advantage of this aproach is that sucess is 
actually guaranteed. I know from other aproaches - i.e. one german forum 
I read is full of such attempts - usually they lead to a whole lot of 
experimentation with nowhere near as good results (if at all). IMHO this 
more boils down to asking yourself if your hobby or job is to produce 
electronics (thus in some casese produce PCBs) or if your hobby is to 
fiddle out how to through plate on the cheap. There is nothing wrong 
with the latter of course but it was not what I was after. I can say 
that using the Bungard chemistry you WILL get high quality results and 
you will have exceptioinally short processing times. Just to mention it, 
thru plating in professional shops easily takes 3 - 4 hours whereas with 
the Bungard chemistry you can run the bath at relatively high ampereage 
resulting in a shorter time. In other words, the complete thru plating 
process this way takes about 50 minutes for standard 18 micron plating.

HTH

Markus

_bojan_ schrieb:
>
> Hi Markus,
>
> I have another question.
>
> In Bungard catalog is price for 500ml of Activator(Catalist). Is it
> suppose that it need to be mixed with 2l of something to get 2,5l of
> ready-to-use solution, or I must to buy 5 x 500ml to get my 2,5l of
> solution.
>
> Same question for other chemicals, cleaner, pre-dip, intensifier &
> copper plating.
>
> P.S. I know it is better to ask Bungard, but you have experience and
> others can learn something from this.
>
> Best regards
>
> Suske
>
>