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Re: Toner Transfer with Toluene

2004-03-24 by Steve

I would not base an assessment of toluene based on trying acetone. I
have seen (and used) acetone as the suggested method to quickly remove
toner from a board after etching. Your toner may look fuzzy because
the acetone partly dissolved it.

Hmmm... gonna have to Google. What is toluene and where would I find
it? Maybe it is supposed to dissolve the coating on the inkjet paper
while not dissolving the toner?

Steve

--- In Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "mikezcnc" <eemikez@c...> wrote:
> I read about it and it uses an inkjet paper in Laser printer (and 
> then one places the paper ink-side down onto a clean copper board. At 
> that time one uses toluene on a cotton ball and gently massages the 
> toluene onto the paper which in turn transfers the toner to copper. I 
> couldn't resist but try this method but since I didn't have toluene I 
> tried the leftover acetone that just keeps oozing out of the can by 
> itself.... The results were interesting. Within seconds I got a nice 
> image trasferred, all of it and almost uniform. The quality of image 
> was poor because I used a very fine SMD image, to challenge the 
> method. It was fuzzy and unfocused and I wonder if that would be 
> enough to resist the etching...
> 
> Has anybody tried with toluene? Maybe toluene behaves differently but 
> I personally doubt it. Thsi method was described somwhere in Europe 
> and they claimed it was a great method. I wonder if they tried it on 
> Power Supply board or RF... or never tried to etch it. From what I 
> see it appears to be another urban legend.
> 
> Mike

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