Introduction

I am building this site primarily to give guidance to those looking to fabricate their own printed circuit boards. I think I have tried every possible way to fabricate a printed circuit board. From the rub on transfers, iron on transfers, to photo-developing. When I decided I wanted to try the photo method, I must have spent six months researching the procedure, vendors, prices. It seemed like no one website had everything I wanted to know. That is the main object of this site. I want to pass on what I spent so much time looking for.

 I can say with no doubt that the photo-developing process is the fastest and least labor intensive, while yielding the HIGHEST quality boards. I remember using the rub on transfers. What a nightmare! If you made ONE mistake in planning or layout, you had to carefully scrape off the lines/patterns you didn't want and hopefully not damage the ones you wanted to keep. Not to mention they would never stick properly. Most of the time they would stick to the application sheet, not your work.

The next thing I tried was an iron-on procedure I found in a electronics parts catalog. At least you could have software to do the mental work for you. That is more than half the process. The idea is, you have a design printed up on a sheet of paper from whatever design program that you choose to use. Then you copy it on any copier using a toner cartridge. Toner, it turns out, is a powder made primarily of plastic. By copying the design onto this special paper and then ironing it on a CLEAN SCRATCH FREE board, you melt the plastic onto the board leaving the plastic behind as etch resist. It wasn't the best end result but I used this process for a long while as I had the computer auto routing pathways. Even without the auto routing it was much easier to manually route on a computer screen than at the coffee table with those rub-ons! The procedure and results can be seen in the techniques section.

 After using the iron on method for about a year and honing my editing skills in the layout editor, I wasn't real happy with the end results I was getting. I was spending a whole lot of time "repairing" a brand new board! The pictures I saw on the net of other peoples projects BLEW mine away. That kind of resolution was never attainable with the iron on deal. I wanted to try the next step.

Go to circuit board construction procedures