Homebrew PCBs

Phil wrote:
> 
> wow, that's kind of rude and very irritating...  I spent half a day 
> fussing with this stuff with like 10 different trials and 4 different 
> kinds of paper. Others indicated similar problems.

   Sorry if you read it that way.  But that is a terribly low amount of time and 
attempts at a new process, and you made little if any mention of the good points 
that it has, even though they are much more important than problems in initial 
passes when you're unfamiliar with what you're doing.  Problems as mentioned are 
usually clear and easy to eliminate later, good points are what's important and 
often hard to come by.  And regardless that others also haven't worked with it 
much yet to get it right, the original posted pics already left little doubt 
that it can work quite well, which means it is more a failing in both of our 
materials or processes to date than the idea.

   Although I will admit that I don't tend to worry nearly so much about being 
politically correct as most people you may be used to.  I type fast and simply 
say what I'm thinking, so it may not always sound exactly right or be sugar 
coated like most people do.  Don't like it, feel free to fight back with your 
own good ideas.  Competing ideas make for far more rapid analysis and 
development than worrying about 100% political correctness anyway.  Plus with 
probably 25 or 30 lists coming in, I am flying through when I am replying to 
messages so I rarely edit and some things may definitely not be phrased the 
right way for intended meanings to start with..



   and by the way, i
> did not say this technique had no merit.

   I wasn't saying you did.  I only said that even with my own poor results 
initial pass I already do see high merit from other observations.  And you must 
be reading most of that message as directed at you or something.  Past the break 
was already largely typed up before your message even hit the list and cut and 
pasted in since they were both on the same subject.  I often do this so there 
aren't lots of excess seperate messages from me all on the same subject.  If 
they're related they go together anyway, but it wasn't all about you.

   But on the other hand you did say this  "  I'm skeptical of this working well 
for 8 mil traces and
tqfp packages."  Why would you be skeptical already?  You've only played with 
the method one morning for a very small number of attempts.  That is not to 
belittle your work, but even 10 or 20 so far is a very small amount for process 
development, especially when considering the materials are basically free. 
Developing stuff like this often takes years in production, so often weeks or 
months at home.  Hundreds of attempts would start being a more reasonable number 
to draw conclusions from, it may take 10 or 20 times this initial stab to start 
getting things under control.




>  Guess I just don't measure 
> up to your godliness.  I hope you can figure this out for us mere 
> mortals to slavishly follow you.
> 


   A large amount of patience and a good long term view of development hardly 
qualifies as godliness.  But with familiarity that my current process evolved 
over 6 months or more before it truly became excellent does make me a little bit 
skeptical that you've tried much in only one morning.  I tried many variations 
at once too, but it'll be weeks of other ideas popping into mind to start 
thinking it isn't likely to provide good results.  And overall development time 
doesn't affect the validity or ease of a process, I can still show or explain 
how to do what I'm now doing in a short time so it doesn't take others 6 months 
to get the same results.  The only difference is long term viewpoint, I likely 
got far worse results than you had, yet see it as a far more positive thing 
because the few things that did go right are the ones that are usually hardest 
to make work.  Wrinkling etc should be dealable later in one manner or another.

Alan