10-10-2016, 10:32 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-10-2016, 10:36 AM by Mike Watterson.)
Yes, you need to feel it's fun to make your own as the bare board, chemicals etc are not cheap and results are very poor compared to the Chinese vendors.
There is a PCB place near me, been in business for maybe 30 years. They now partner with a place in Eastern Europe for medium volume and a Chinese company for prototypes and large volume. As they have regular shipping from China, it's about 2 or 3 weeks faster than dealing direct with ordinary China mail, but more expensive.
They may still do something in house as they supplied me with blank 0.8mm PCB for the mill in 2008.
Thick accurate solder resist hugely helps with alignment to solder SMT ICs. I use a regular size wedge bit, pre-tin board and then simply reflow three to four pins at a time with dry tip.
For SMT transistors, caps, resistors (work well on stripboard) I use very fine solder and regular wedge tip.
There is a PCB place near me, been in business for maybe 30 years. They now partner with a place in Eastern Europe for medium volume and a Chinese company for prototypes and large volume. As they have regular shipping from China, it's about 2 or 3 weeks faster than dealing direct with ordinary China mail, but more expensive.
They may still do something in house as they supplied me with blank 0.8mm PCB for the mill in 2008.
Thick accurate solder resist hugely helps with alignment to solder SMT ICs. I use a regular size wedge bit, pre-tin board and then simply reflow three to four pins at a time with dry tip.
For SMT transistors, caps, resistors (work well on stripboard) I use very fine solder and regular wedge tip.
