solder masks with kapton film
2009-10-22 by Henry Liu
I've been using laser transparencies to burn some soldermasks and it works pretty well. I export the Gerber layer into DXF from Altium Designer and it cuts all the holes from the DXF file directly no problem but I get some melting near the edges so I ordered some kapton film to burn also. I was thinking why not burn the top and bottom mask layers also? Then you could glue the layers onto the pcb. They even make kapton in tape form so you don't even need to glue it. The melting temperature for kapton is 400C so should survive soldering. Anyone try this? Seems like an easy way to make the two layers. Some place like http://ohararp.com/Stencils.html will sell you a whole 8.5"x11" sheet for $25. You can glue the top/bottom soldermask as well as get the soldermask stencil all at the same time and just cut it with a paper cutter. That said, you can still buy finished pcbs for like $50-100 total so probably not worth it if you don't have your own laser cutter.