Homebrew PCBs

The Chinese laser engravers have gone down in price.. I have seen some as low as $1500. 
The problem I see with the lasers are, they work by burning off the paint and most of the paints I have tried leave behind a residue which needs a solvent to clean up which also removes the original paint. With the residue the copper does not etch well, it has always been a hit or miss on the boards I tried. I would like to see a boards done using a laser and also the details of the type of paint used so I can try it out once again. 
 
Kim

--- On Mon, 5/3/10, Andrew Villeneuve <andrewmv@gmail.com> wrote:


From: Andrew Villeneuve <andrewmv@...>
Subject: Re: [Homebrew_PCBs] Resist ink pens
To: Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, May 3, 2010, 11:28 AM


Bob,

I've seen several tutorials on the laser engraving approach, which seems to
work very reproducibly.  Naturally, these all came from shops that had
access to an industrial laser engraver for other reasons.

small-shop laser engraving machines have started to emerge on the market in
the past few years - I've seen one as low as US$4,000.  Well outside of my
budget, but compared to some of the CNC milling approaches that I've seen
discussed here, it's actually very viable.

I've not specifically seen any of these low-end machines used for PCB
etching, though I wouldn't imagine there would be a problem.

-Andrew


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