How to Make Double Sided Circuit Boards at Home

hi there I see that there's some interest in the way that I build my little circuit boards so in this episode I'll take you through the process of exactly how I do that so let's get right into it this is the circuit board that we're going to build today you recognize the circuit board from the Magnusson video this is a small double-sided circuit board and I figure that I'll show you how to make a double-sided circuit board and really by doing that you will also learn how to make a single sided circuit board really all you're doing is eliminating one layer and it also allows me to show you the packet method in them of course I do the toner transfer method it's a little different than than most but I'll get into that when we come to that particular point now the program I'm using is tracks maker and tracks maker is a really neat program it's really versatile I really enjoy it I'm using it on a relatively old computer here and this computer is basically only used for circuit board design and it's off the net now and you know I've got some cat other CAD programs and I have a very extended tracks maker library in this so you know this is kind of an irreplaceable program right now since I have so many boards stored in here hundreds and hundreds of circuit boards are on the drive of this computer and when you start making circuit boards you're going to want to have another drive to back them up don't don't ever leave that to one drive if you make lots of special little circuit boards like I have and your drive fails you want to be able to get those back again so it's always very important to back up your work I've got some boards that I've spent days on very very complex boards and every you know if I work on it one day and then you know the next day I come back and the next day I come back and the next day I come back every day I back that up to the external drive if something was to ever go wrong you know you you'd be four days of work or something like that would be gone so it's very important to have an external drive to do this and if you ever start building these and you spend time on this you'll be thinking about that that'll be right at the top of your head if you know something ever fails you lose all your work so you want to be very careful with that now most of these programs will default to two colors the top they're like which is green here would be red and then the back layer is usually blue now that's very hard to look at for an extended period of time so I changed my colors to green and black and it's easy to remember because the black is the back side and the green is a top side and then of course this is just a standard it's kind of a brownish color is the pad layer both layers they call a board layer and it'll be you know the back side and the top side so this is much easier to stare at for an extended period of time now when you're working with this board in you're laying components out you got to remember that you're looking this way through you're looking at this and you're seeing the backside of the board as if it was transparent so all the components on the backside of the board have to be mirrored in your mind as you're installing these or laying these out so a normal SOT 23 package transistor which this is a BC eight one seven would be base collector emitter if I'm looking at this from the top side but you have to remember oh I'm Sol during this on the rear side so that has to be mirrored this is base this is collector and this is emitter so you need to remember that when you're working with components on these boards everything that you lay on the top side of the board if you visualize it on the top it will be the same but if it's on the back it has to be like this and when it's like that of course everything is mirrored so you have to keep that in mind that sometimes where things get a bit confusing and that's where double-checking your work really pays off so these components here that you see are through-hole parts and all these pads here they show up on both sides of the board they'll show up on the top print and on the bottom print now since these boards don't have any plated through holes what you're doing is you're effectively soldering the component on the top side and on the bottom side that's basically all you're doing so you're using the leg of the component as the as the plated through-hole really now if you remember I have positive and negative wires coming to these posts right here or to these little pads here so I just solder the wire on both sides what I do is I meet in the wire and if that's going to be too big I'll just add flux to the wire I'll tell solder it on the on the top side and that'll kind of Preet in the bottom side and then I just tack up the bottom side so as long as you know you're not leaving excessive lengths of wire you know what you do is I push the wire right down to the board so the insulation touches and I pull it back just a little bit and then when I solder it the little solder ball comes right up to the insulation and it looks really quite neat you don't have excessive wire hanging off the other side so it can short and it just looks like it's been soldered on both sides again you know it takes a little bit of time to get used to all of this stuff but that's the way it goes now since this is showing both sides of the board here I'll just get to the two this other side of the board here I'll get rid of the top layer or actually no I'll get rid of the bottom layer and we'll just look at the top layer here now you'll notice that there's no traces connected to these pads here I leave the pads here because I'm prototyping and when you prototype you're going to be drilling these out with a dremel so I have a dremel press you can't just have a normal Dremel and Dremel these out with a small drill bit because you'll be snapping drill bits like crazy you do need a dremel press or a very very small jeweler's drill press or something like that you'll have to have you can't just do this by hand so and I'll get into that here in a little bit but I leave the pads on the top of the board even though there's no traces and the reason that I do this is because I don't want to be flipping that circuit board back and forth on what I'm Dremel enos you know take the board out flip it over and and drill this side and then drill this side I just want to do it all through one side just to cut down time and by having these little pads just sitting here it doesn't hurt anything it's just well it's less copper in my etchant so so I can just stay right there and it looks absolutely fine there's a resistor that sits here so I can actually solder the resistor lift the resistor just a little bit and solder it on both sides and it looks really quite nice when you do it like that there's a cap that sits here that h-e a Aries cap by Nishikawa sits right here and it sits right down on these pads so you don't even see the pads on this side of the board now of course the upside to working on a circuit board like this here is you can get rid of all the perfection imperfections that you've made before you're going to export this to some sort of a PC board house and that really is the whole idea of doing this if you wanted to have hundreds of these made you want to make sure that you everything is perfect you don't have any stray lead inductance it's going to cause issues if you're making an RF circuit board you want to make sure that everything's hooked up right you want to make sure you're not having any problems with interference or feedback or oscillation or anything like that and that's we're proving things out on a circuit board like this is absolutely fine and of course you get a really professional product done when you do it the way that I do and you could actually just keep using it like this and it would be absolutely fine like you see I make lots of these circuit boards and use them everywhere in fact I've even plotted some of them as you've seen in some of my other videos and they're you know they're absolutely fine there's it's a really professional job when you're done in fact you know when you make something like this in you coat it with a lacquer or anything like that or just you know as you tin it like I do you know really what's the difference aside from having parts marked on it and you know the coating on the board and maybe plated through-hole sits that's it really so I can make say I'll make twenty of these boards in seven minutes so I can make I'll print out ten on one row and ten on another I have a big vat and I put this thing in a vat and it takes roughly seven minutes with a heated solution and it's done I have twenty boards edged off ready to go so all I have to do is drill them in the drill time for a board like this would be about a minute something like that aside from these two holes here because I would drill these out to 6:32 and that's for those large screws so but then again if I had all the boards you know like if you pre-drill these out with the the drills at the actual dremel when you go to a drill press it's a guide hole a larger drill press and it's just like zip-zip and it's that fast you're done so you can see that there is quite a time advantage to to doing this at your at your own home and that rather than exporting this to a PC board house if you want to do a bunch of prototypes very fast you can do this and it works out very very well and you get a very professional result by doing it swaye so now when you're printing this thing out is where things get a little bit confusing and you need to remember this if you're going to do this you want to mark this down on a piece of paper this is important because you'll forget this when it comes time to get into the print section the top layer which is a green layer when you're in your print menu is mirrored the backside is not mirrored when it's printed so you don't mirror the rear but any printing that you do put on the backside you can see how I've put this here on here this has to be premiered so that you have to mirror it before you actually you know go to the print so this here is printed backwards or in a mirrored fashion here on this one side if you don't if you haven't see how this is written Karlsson here if you have this the same way on in black here on the backside of the board this would be completely backwards so that's where it gets a little bit confusing the top side the green you see is mirrored in the print menu the black is not mirrored but any writing has to be mirrored on the actual board and now that's really the only confusing thing now I have two printers hooked up to this I have an ink printer and my HP a laser printer now I test all of this on my ink printer I'll print this off on the ink printer very quickly and I'll lay components on here make sure nothing's touching each other you know the spacings right you know things like this SOT 23 package a transistor isn't too close to this hole here so when I put a nut driver on to tighten a little transistor down to the heatsink it's not going to touch the collector and things like that you know make sure that the tan alumns aren't too close to the pins here and of course if you want to default you know f3 you know it'll default you to the actual real size of the board here and you can kind of look at it on the screen and get an idea of course I always pre print and you know pre check everything before I do anything so a couple of things you want to keep in mind um what else can I tell you here that the toner cartridge in a regular HP printer like I've got an HP printer I got from Staples is an $80 HP laser printer and you know they come with a trial cartridge and it's got about oh we no quarter toner inside of it or something silly like that that lasted me two years of making circuit boards because you know really this is all you get right the rest of the papers all blank when you're doing RF circuit boards and you have a lot of fill everywhere if there's lots of fill you know for you know ground plane layer and stuff like that of course you're going to go through tone or quite a bit faster because there's big thick chunks of it written everywhere or up you know printed onto the onto the layout everywhere but you know for most cases when you're doing circuit boards like this they last like I got years out of that first one I've replaced that toner cartridge sense and I imagine it will probably go and tell if the printer doesn't work anymore so the printer is off all the time you know I only turn on my laser printer when I build circuit boards everything else comes out of my ink printer and my ink printer is wireless so all the computers around here do it I've got computers strewn everywhere in here so you know I've got a laptop right here I've got the old computer here the computer I do my videos on is upstairs is another computer over there is there everywhere here so so this one my ink printer which is just out of the shot it's right over on this side here if you look at my lab video I think you can see the printer sitting on that one side that's the printer I use it's another HP Officejet Pro 8600 my ink printer it works very well I've never had any grief with it and it wireless wireless lis links to everything beautifully so I can just print stuff off from anywhere anywhere in the place here so again this this this old fella here he's retired but you know great for circuit board still this is the original this is the original screen you know that came with the printer area that came with the computer and you know the tower is all fine and you know I've been through it and just take care of the old computer end up and it just keeps going and going and going so it's great computer old HP old HP computer from way back in the 2000s so that's how this is really done I hope I've covered everything here I just want to make sure that I'm not you know leaving anything out here so really oh the borders here you'll see that I've got good little green kind of corners here I draw a box on the screen first in in the actual real view so I'll draw a ball and that's the size of the circuit board that I'm going to make so it's a complete you know square this is the the topside trace and I just draw a complete box and then I work within that box so I don't exceed that size and then of course when I come back up to here and fill the screen you know I know that I can't exceed this boundary because this is going to be the size of the board that I cut out and I cut all my boards in a bandsaw so I've got a sharp blade and a bandsaw it's actually a metal cutting blade it's a very fine toothed bandsaw blade and then what I do is before I print this off I I cut the other lines out so this entire line is in here these are just guides for cut for using the bandsaw and I'll draw with a ruler I'll join the sides here to here to here to here and then I'll cut this off in my band so I'm very close to this and then I've got a bench a bench grinder that's really has a slow turning wheel on it it's for knife sharpening is got a really huge wheel on it and I'll take these and I'll plane them on the side of the wheel as its turning and it planes this stuff completely true and you get very square circuit boards out of that now of course you can't do that for extremely large boards you got to make sure your bandsaw you know your your bandsaw cut is really nice and square if you're concerned about that and if not you could file the edges with a large file or plane them if you have a very big plane but for this it works very very well I'm basically making small circuit boards all the time I've made some larger ones like you've seen in the Nixie tube my very first video which was that Nixie tube that Monsanto Nixie tube frequency counter there was a rather large board made in that one and that you know that was basically a complete redesign of that Nixie counter but give that was lots of through-hole ICS on that one and lots of vias and stuff like that so you can you can check that one out if you like just look for my very first video this video number one so what I do is I just trim these off and then I leave these here's just guides for cutting it that's really all that this is here so I kind of draw that around there's a couple you know tricks of the trade that you learn after a while after you prototype for so long it gets really really fast as I say like I can you know make these boards in no time at all I can print you know seven minutes is with the rough fetching time in a heated solution I could have twenty of these boards done again not drilled or anything and that's another thing of why I like to make surface mount boards because there is no drilling most of the boards that I do make you know that are going to be a 20 off or something like that if I make 20 of them they're all surface mount so there's no drilling it's just basically you etch them you tend them and they're done you just cut cut them out and that's very very quick so in the time that it takes again to export all of these to a PC board house your your finished your run and it's out the door and they're gone already you know well before you would ever receive this now again you can only make a double-sided board in here you can't go you know quadruple layer boards or triple layer boards or anything like this so you are limited to a two sided board now in the print menu here I'll just show you the print menu here it'll give you an X scale and a y scale that wants to be at one I have it at three because I print these out I'll print this thing out much larger on my ink printer and then I draw in all the sizes so what I do is all you know mark that there's a one mic talam here one might channel them here you know put this a BC eight one seven and this is that two in whatever the number was a to-220 package transistor this is a cap and this is a resistor and I'll mark it all in their values and everything on a big piece of paper so and put it in a file and then I just look this up the next time I want to make it look at my file and I've got all the component values there so that's why it's at three but you make this for one for the actual print so X scale is one Y scale is one and then when you go into the options menu if you're going to batch print the top layer is mirrored the bottom layer is not mirrored the board layer you want to include the board layer obviously that's the brown ones here all right the pads of course you want those the vias yes we don't have any vias in here this is the vias and I haven't got any vias in here text rings yes of course we want all the text strings the path file name layer no don't want this on there that's needless and the single layer Pat holes I don't want that checked off either because if I check that off it'll leave these holes in the SOT 23 pads when I print this off and leave these little holes here in these pads here for the tantalum caps and stuff like that I don't want any of those there so I don't want to check that off I want these little solid blocks and really after that is you just hit print send it to your laser printer and you'll get two copies one the first one will come out mirrored which will be the top layer and then you'll see the backside will come out on another sheet of paper so you need to load your printer with two pieces of paper and I'll get into explaining exactly how you know what kind of paper and how all that works in the next shot here so that's really what you end up with and then I'll show you how to link those up so and that'll be the next stash out here before we go printing this off on the laser printer we want to print a mock circuit board out on just a regular piece of paper and I use my ink printer for this and this is so that we can size up a piece of circuit board so we get minimal amount of waste so I've got a cutting board because you know I make quite a few of these little boards and if you're going to do a whole bunch of these boards owning one of these cutting boards really does make things quite a bit nicer and this is the one with the laser in it if you can see that laser glowing yeah you can kind of see it back there and I slide the paper and you might even see it along there the edge there so that really does make things quite a bit nicer now I've got these little alignment edges left here and then what I'll do is I'll put this over to the alignment edge like this I don't know if you can see that on camera and I'll cut that off there and then I'll slide this over and this is where using that laser really works because you can't see through the paper right so then you've cut this off here and I'll run it through like so and I'll just align that all up it's kind of hard to do this around the tripod so I'll just one more to go here and we have it so now this is the size of our circuit board you can see it's got nice clean edges I just you know I could have cut this a lot cleaner if I wasn't around the actual tripod it wasn't exactly square there but this gives us the right rough idea for you know for cutting a piece of blank circuit board out so what I'll do now is I will go gray have a small piece of circuit board and explain the next step now that we've got our little piece cut out here this is our size reference want to go grab a piece of scrap circuit board or something like that and this is just out of my you know circuit board piece bin I've got a whole bunch of just random pieces and then not what you're going to do is cut your piece of circuit board just a little bit larger than the piece of paper because of course again this is our size reference so now you want to make sure that it's double-sided it has to have copper on both sides because we're making a double sided circuit board and then once you've got that all cut out you'll end up with a little piece that looks like this now this is a little bit excessive again let's get the lamp up here a little bit this is a little bit excessive again but I had this piece already laying around I didn't actually have to cut anything so I just opted to use this now you'll also find that the more if you leave and a little bit more between your layout and the edge of the board like you can see this is all going to be cut this is scrap the better the chances that your board is going to turn out perfect if you cut this really close to the edge you know there's a chance you might lose some of your lettering or something like that the whole idea is this is going to get fed through a laminator and that roller has to come up on top of this and roll this down flat so if you give it just a little bit of a lip so that the roller can come in true you'll find that your layout will pretty much turn out perfect the first time every time so you may find that it's worth to leave just an extra little bit of circuit board and deal with a little bit more scrap so that way you don't have to do this over again and in the end if you ever make them like this you'll you'll understand why it's worth leaving that little bit of an extra gap this is again just a little bit excessive I would have cut it you know a little closer to the edge maybe like so but this one here is a little bit big again it's a scrap piece so it's got to be double-sided and before you go about you know finishing this off you got to make sure that you deburr the edges because if you cut this in a bandsaw that's how I cut all of this out right you get burs of copper on the edge so you want to make sure that you file the edges to make sure they're smooth because you've got to feed this through a laminator and you don't want these people you know that those copper burrs to cut the rollers in your lamb and that goes for both sides we have to file both sides and make sure the corners are nice and dull and then after you've done that sand this up with 800 grit sandpaper so sand it up and then once this is all sanded and you know it's evenly sanded on both sides then what you're going to do is you're going to take some brake cleaner or you can even use an acetone or something like that and wipe this off and just because you don't want any of that excess copper or even dust on here and you don't you don't want any oil from your fingers on this because that'll affect the toner so we're not at that point yet this is just our mock print up here just to get the size and this doesn't really count for anything except for sizing up a piece of circuit board but in the end I'll show you that it's very important you don't want any dust on here and I'll show you how to use a piece of the scrap paper we cut to scrape this and make sure that there's no dust on here because any dust will cause the that toner not to bond properly so it's a it's kind of a little bit of a process but you know through doing this you know so many times you kind of end up perfecting this home so in the next shot here what I'll do is I'll print up the two sides and I'll show you how to you know slip this into the packets and make the little packet up and then after that it will be into the laminator alright I'm going to try and do this around the tripod here so here we have both of them printed off now I've printed this on - this is double-sided glossy flier paper and it's designed for an inkjet printer not a not an actual laser printer okay so this is these are designed for an ink and ink printing and the reason that I've done this is because the toner doesn't stick to this stuff all that incredibly great and it transfers very very well so now we need to do is we need to cut these in strips of course we need to leave a little bit more than what we see here on the actual arrows or on the the edges here so I need to cut this just a little wider than the edge on each side and I'll show you that right now and of course it'll be the same for the back side so I'll come in here and I'll take a look what we've got and that looks about good all right now you don't want to make a bunch of copies of these and save them because this works good about Oh 10 to 15 minutes out of the actual printer so that's the best time to actually do this now you see how we have won the full length of the piece of paper this is a full length okay so now what I'm going to do is I'll just put this down here where it's safe now I'm going to cut this one here the exact same way okay so this is no indexing on the sides but I'm really not too concerned about that I'll just cut it a ways away from the from the lettering all right make sure that that's somewhat square cut it there okay and I'll move this over to here to watch the little screen on my camera but a bump it with my head okay here all right now you'll see that this one is you know roughly the same length as the other one right okay well we don't want that so we're going to make one just a little bit shorter but not too incredibly short but just a little bit shorter okay so I'll take this side here and I'll just cut it off all about there and about there so now we have one that's just a little bit shorter from side to side now what I've got here is you probably recognize this is an old overhead projector now this old overhead projector allows me to put this on here usually what I do is I have a you know some paper up here so that this is a Fresnel lens like things so you don't want all that in light shining in your eyes so what I'll do is I'll turn this on like this okay and this allows me to see through this piece of paper and then what I'll do is I'll take this here alright and I put this on top like this and you can see how they're mismatched I hope you can see that in the lens there and then what I do is I bring them right tell they're matched and I can see the little holes like if you look through this piece of paper over here if I get a flashlight you see there's little holes in there see the little holes and I can match those little holes up on this here using that lens so I can see right through and I can see the actual light come through both layers so when I have both of these matched up perfectly so they're right on top of each other what I do then is I get a piece of tape all right I hold this really steady down here I usually have a piece of tape already on my finger like so all right and then what I'll do is I'll match these up as close as I can get them and they match dead-on and then what you do is once you get all the little circles lined up you hold this down and you put a piece of tape on this end and then you hold it down like so roll your hand over make sure the lines are all still lined up pull another piece of tape off and tape it on both sides now when I have that all done because they can't do that on the camera with me bending over the tripod and everything here I'll be back and I'll show you what I've come up with okay so now that I've got this all taped together which only takes just a matter of seconds all right you'll see here that it's it's taped on each end here that's the reason that we stagger cut these so I can tape this on here that's the reason I trim that little bit off so I can tape it if not you're taping it around the edges and it doesn't work very well there's absolutely no movement between these pieces of paper when you put two pieces of tape here now if you look here in the camera you can see that the holes perfectly line up see that there you see straight through see there's light coming through those pad holes now it's because they perfectly line up from side to side all right might be a little harder to see these there you go so you can see that I just have to hold the paper tight so now that's what this lens helps me do on this old projector now you can pick these old projectors up for 20 30 bucks and that's what I did I found one on CL there and picked one up so now that we've got this done we want to take our piece of freshly sanded and clean this has been cleaned with great cleaner our piece of circuit board here double-sided circuit board and what we want to do is we want to use these alignment tangs that we had on the edges you know those little kind of half there are those little corners there and we want to slide this right between okay so what I'm going to do is put this here and that's roughly about Center right there so once you get your circuit board in there and it's all centered up you can just pretty much fold it like this and then it's ready to go like this so now what's going to happen is when I feed this through this laminator it's going to perfectly match up both sides because they've been taped in a line here this goes through the laminator a couple of times like this which I'll show you and then what I do is I trim the edges off with an exacto knife really close in that in the junk area that we're going to be cutting off so that we just have two pieces of paper stuck to this copper by the toner and then we'll feed it through a bunch more times and then what we'll do is we'll peel the paper off and we'll see what we're left with so that'll be the next step so now I've got to go get that laminator and I'll show you that this is the laminator that I've built this is the just a regular you know laminator staples laminator and there's a blower fan on here to cool the gearing on this side that I've added there's a power transformer here to power up the little circuit board that's on here and this is the temperature controller that's inside controlling this laminator now I had to modify the the actual the throw you'll see this this color of this led change when the the temperature gets up to temperature and that's two hundred and seven degrees Celsius is how hot this is so it's an extremely hot laminator and of course if you build anything like this you know you're doing so at your own risk you really burn yourself bad with this thing but that's the temperature that this is at right now that there that's coming out of there is just incredibly hot so this will come up to temperature even with this blower fan going the speed is reduced at this on this fan here and what happens is is this this unit here has got two silicone rollers inside of it and two really large pieces of aluminum those rollers up now the aluminum doesn't touch the silicone rollers in there but it's enough to heat those rollers right hot now there's I used a diode for sensing you can see it's up to temperature now I've used a diode in here to sense the temperature on this so I've modified this quite a bit as you know this is like nothing like a normal laminator anymore but them there's a diode that's on one of the aluminum extrusions inside here that do the heating there's a heating elements on both sides and that senses the temperature the internal temperature of this all the wiring that I put in there is got that high heat achieving across it up in here and you know again this fan is only here to keep the gearing cool so that the gearing doesn't melt and you know I've used this for what four or five years now and it works absolutely fine so there's been no grief with this whatsoever the diode that I use in here this will be a video within itself one day there there's a lot of explanation to the way that this thing is put together but you can buy laminators now that that go really really super hot and that have quite a throw and what I mean the throw is that the actual rollers will spread apart a long ways a normal laminator you can't feed a circuit board through it'll just jam in there because the lamp the actual rollers are only designed to go apart maybe the thickness of a couple sheets of paper and you know this of course it had to modify it so that the rollers will you know I can fit a piece of fr4 through here no problems or any kind of board for that matter I want this to to accept on my circuit boards so that's how this thing really works just quickly without getting into the you know the just of this is I say this whole thing will be an entire video within itself how to make one of these things one day again you know just a regular run-of-the-mill laminator so you know the fan is epoxy on to the side and these this is the control circuit board here and there's another board here which is a little fan which keeps everything cool on there so and that's really how this whole thing works so what I need to do now is grab that circuit board again here so now I usually wear gloves when I do this but if I really really quick it doesn't hurt that incredibly bad so what I'll do is I cut off the excess now you have to leave the tape here but I just cut off anything that I don't need so there's a little bit of paper left you know the tape comes right to there so you can't cut through the tape if you cut through the tape you're you're kind of messed up at this particular point so now what I'm going to do is feed this through the laminator a couple of times just like this I'll start here and I'll feed it through I'll see if I can reposition the camera and get all of this on the camera and if not I'll have to just do this you know off camera this is a huge tripod right in front of me here and everything and this is really hard to do so I'll try and reposition things to see if I can get this all in there and if I can I'll do that alright so I slipped my gloves on here just so I don't burn myself so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to feed this through the laminator just like this and I'll let that press that down tight on to the circuit board there and I'll do this once or twice okay it's off on the other side here and I'll do it one more time here I'll feed it through and then what I'm going to do is grab my knife and I'm going to cut the excess off here really quickly while it's still hot so hopefully I can do this all on camera so what I need now is a ruler so this is going to cool off rather quickly and this is really hard to do here because it's I'm not this is not my normal area I do this in but this only works with the actual camera so okay so there's one side there other side there flip this over it'd be very careful with these knives and your fingers so okay so now we'll see that this is you know just like this right here okay so there's no access paper and as quickly as I can I want that back in the laminator so I'll slip a glove back on because it usually does get pretty hot one glove is a lot of the times enough okay and a quick little shuffle there and back through again this end is the hot end of my laminator is really hot at this end there's a bit of the fans blocked off on this end but this ends is the hottest so I use this for small boards I always just stack it at this end but it'll work anywhere in here I think I can get one or two less passes by doing this so then what I'll do is I'll put it through kind of like this so that it'll get the corners got to make sure that it doesn't hit when you're putting that through you got to make sure that you size that up and I just put it through a bunch of passes like this and then when it's done I'll just use something to you know quickly pull the heat off of it and just use this piece of circuit board here and press it against this and I'll just show ya I'll put it through one more pass and I think we're good okay so now what I want to do is put that on my bench top and just press it down and try and sink as much heat off of this as I can while holding it tight against the bench so I'll move it over because that part of the bench is hot and of course this part of the circuit board is hot so we'll do that again and usually by about now it's you know really you can handle it yeah it's just finger warm now so I just sink the heat off on the bench a couple of times turn this back down to cool because I don't need this anymore so there's a little lamp that means cool down it just you just ignore this lamp here and that's really what happens so now what I need to do is let this soak in some water for just a homemade about five minutes or something like that and I'll get that all prepared right now and then I'll be back and I'll show you what we do with this all right the next step here is we've been soaking it in water and we want to press all of the water into the paper as much as we can so that the paper is completely saturated now this is double sided glossy and I think the next time I'm going to try just single sided I think it did try the single sided one other time but this seemed to work better but I might just buy another package of it anyways just to try it out but this works very good this stuff it's just that since it's double-sided glossy takes a long time for the water to permeate this paper so once this has happened in you you know you've pressed all of the you can't really see any white anymore what you want to do then is you just grab the paper and very very carefully peel it back all right so you can see here now we're just peeling the paper off ever so carefully and you can see we're left with a with the layout on the printed circuit board now we do is we go to this other side here and we do the same thing just carefully peel it off if the toner is stuck correctly when you're pulling this off nothing will come off with it so if you notice that sometimes you'll one of the corners might go missing or something like that that's okay as long as that you know the most of its there this one here everything is all there it's because we ran it through the laminator quite a few times so now what I do is I get a little bit of water on a rag and you have to get all the paper out of all the little holes so if you can see that on the screen there all these little holes in here they all have a little bit of paper stuck to them and you need to get that paper out of those holes so that when we do put it into the etchant that the it will etch those little holes out or you know we won't have we won't get the proper etching here so what I'll do is you want to make sure that you know you keep your paper a little bit wet so that you don't go taking off any toner now you got to keep in mind that this toner is on here extremely well like this this toner is is part of this copper right now in fact it's a lot of the times it's pretty hard to get off so that's one of the tricks of having the laminator up so incredibly hot you want that laminator as hot as possible and you know so that it's not going to cause any problems to the board or anything but you also want it to to transfer it now there is a fine balance you know if it's too incredibly hot the the toner will smudge in this kind of stuff so it is a fine balance I found that 207 degrees or 200 and you know between 200 200 and and 210 is absolutely fine so once you think you've got it all cleaned off here I'll just see if I can find my flashlight again once you've got it all cleaned off here and again you want to make sure that you know there's nothing in the holes so you have to look over this very carefully under under the light and then look at it kind of on an angle and make sure that there's no paper stuck in those little holes and if they are just you know give it a bit more of a scrub with that rag and make sure there's nothing there so this is clean there is there's no paper in any of these holes or anything so while this should edge pretty nicely and that will be the next step my action that I use is just standard ferric chloride now a lot of people want to use this new thing that they're doing they're using a peroxide and they're mixing it with something and it becomes Cooper or something rather you know what I'm talking about it turns green the problem with that particular formula is that you only get really one go out of it and it's got to go and you know if you're trying to reuse the formula again it's you know it's picky and you know you have to you know you're continually playing with chemicals this ferric chloride this mixture will stay good for about Oh 30 or 40 edges and even though the copper sits on the bottom here it'll just keep edging away just keeps going and going and going and you know there is no problems with this of course you have to dispose of this correctly you know you don't want to be doing anything stupid like dumping this down your drain or anything but you have to dispose of this correctly whereas the other stuff they say that you know there's a chance of you doing it but there's still copper in it and all this kind of all this kind of stuff but at any rate you get much longer life out of this material or out of this chemical than you do out of the other one and you can just pop it in whenever you want now what I do is this this is a sealed container there's a rubber gasket inside here and it's it's called a glass lock container so what this is is it's a glass container here and there's a big rubber seal on the inside so when you clip the lid down it completely seals the chemical in there so when you're actually using this stuff nothing is spilling out going all over the place now I heat this this jar up just up you know the hot water out of a hot water tap is enough to heat this up to make this stuff work a lot better ferric chloride when it's just warm it H is quite a bit faster and I can get oh you know about seven minutes worth of time this will sit in there and it'll be completely etched at that point so that's what I'm going to do now I can't do that here and I have to do this in a different area and it's hard to get my camera in there I really need a camera person to be to be doing this around me so right now it's just me so what I'll do is I'm going to pop this in here I have to heat this solution up so basically it's just another little tub of water around this that's warm and I put this inside there and then I'll drop this inside here and then I'll just move this around here for about seven minutes so I shake it back and forth and like this keep in mind this is completely sealed so nothing comes out and then now when we're done I put this on top of a towel and I pop the lid open and you know check this out now a lot of the times I'll shine this flashlight here which is uh batteries you're going haywire but I'll shine this flashlight through the bottom of this and I'll look at the circuit board to make sure it's etched before I actually open it up and when it's completely etched then I do open it so I'm kind of prepared at that time so that's what I'll be doing next and I'll come back with the edge board the circuit board is done it was only about five minutes in the solution it's relatively fresh solution so it went really quickly just you know mildly heated so this is all done and etched I'll turn on my flashlight here and you can see the alignment of the holes there you can see the alignment is perfect see straight through them right down to the other side of the board so that means that everything on the opposite side of the board came into alignment and it does this every time there's no fluking with this when you do that package method it just comes out perfect like this every single time so you can line up both sides of your circuit board and that's really how easy it is to to do a double sided circuit board so what I'll do now is I'll get some lacquer thinner and take this toner off a lot of people like to use acetone but the problem with acetone taking toner off especially this HP toners it likes to push it into the surface of the board so I'll use lacquer thinner and remove this it's not as harsh as acetone acetone is great for removing flux are a type flux after you solder the parts and it doesn't hurt anything at that point but this toner it seems to you know make streaks and lines inside the circuit board and it makes for a messy board so I use lacquer thinner for this point you also you want to use gloves whenever you're doing this kind of stuff and you know of course you're doing all of this at your own risk so you have to really take Kerry note your doing with these chemicals do the research before you do this that ferric chloride will stain really bad if you have an around appliances or anything like that or you know anything that if you get any of it on there it'll stain it permanently so you have to be very very careful you don't want to get it on your hands either that's not good for you and of course it'll stain you as well so you need to be very very careful so so gloves are a necessity and of course if you're agitating anything you want to wear eye protection and you know respirators if you're doing this in an enclosed area you got to make sure that you have the right type of respirator on you don't want to inhale any any fumes off of any of this stuff whatsoever so you need to take care and make sure that you're doing all of that correctly so just take care you're doing so all at your own risk so this is the board here what I'm going to do now is get rid of this toner on here and then I'll come back and I'll show you what the board looks like without the toner alright there's just a little bit of lacquer thinner in this bowl I got to be very careful I don't touch anything on my camera or anything with this this the stuff just attacks plastic really bad so so while lacquer thinner kind of scary stuff so here we go we've got the circuit board I'll just drop it into here for just a second all right I'll move that around alright so now what we're going to do is just remove the toner you can see it already wants to just come straight off and there you go this is really hard to do on camera usually what I do is I just went a little bit of a cloth and wipe it off but this just makes it a little bit easier for the for camera sake here so we've got to be very very careful with this stuff I think it's a little bit less aggressive than it's a little less aggressive than then acetone acetone is just crazy stuff it'll push the it'll push the actual toner right into the it'll push it right into the into the circuit board so you can see here that we have a pretty much a clean circuit board right underneath all that toner and that's how we get all those up pencil-thin traces I guess I'm zoomed in too much here to get a ticket of you so I'll just widen this up a little so you can see so what it looks like nice and clean there we go and the copper is exposed so now the next thing that we're going to do is I'll show you how I drill this I'm ready to drill the holes here and you can see that I've got my Dremel press here and underneath the Dremel press is a little light so that when I slide the board over it'll illuminate the holes in the circuit board so that way I can aim the bit for the little hole and it makes life quite a bit easier so I just added a little white LED on the bottom side I also have another one on the top that I can move into place and I can look now it's really bright in the camera but in person it's you know just average so it's just a camera that's doing that but um I can move this out of the way and then just use the bottom one so for the double sided I can just you know aim for the little white dots and drill it out so these are the drill bits here that I use I believe these are a tungsten carbide I'm really not sure they're incredibly hard drill bits and they work very good and they never seem to doll up so these are the little drill bits I use work very very well if you go and up you know by they're the regular hobbies or kind of a drill bit you'll end up with something like this and you know you get an OK life out of them but they dull up pretty quick so I usually stick to these ones here now I broke a whole bunch of these drill bits because when I bought this press it came in sideways it was this Cup wasn't square and those little bits would just you know break after a couple of runs and I kept wondering why am i breaking so many bits so I ended up measuring the angle here and of course it's coming in crooked so we think right from the factory this thing would be straight but no it was crooked so I shoved it out I shaved up the little drill in the cup here because the cup doesn't sit quite square and now it comes in completely straight and I haven't gone through a drill bit yet now you end up you end up doing things like this to your drill bits and that's a pretty aggravating so that's how I drilled the little circuit boards out in and I'll you know drill these holes I'll pre drill them here and then I'll take it into the garage and I'll drill these out to the appropriate size like you know 6 32 or something like that and then of course I you know I still have the indexing here on the side so I draw a line with a pencil and I'll take this to the bandsaw and then I'll cut this raid along a line here and then after I have this thing completely drilled I have one more process to do and I'm not going to drill this because I'm not going to use this right now but what I'll do is I'll show you the last process and go from there alright so I'm going to try and catch this last process on camera so I have a product here called liquid tin and I'm not so sure if my camera is going to focus on it is made by mg chemicals and this is what I use to tin the circuit boards so this stuff is a pretty nasty chemical you want to be very careful with this stuff so always wear gloves and the proper you know face protection and everything like that you don't want to get any of this stuff on unit it has a pretty nasty egg smell to it so so I'll see if I can get this on camera here if you can watch the watch what's going on in here you see it pretty much just instantly tens and that's where my circuit boards get that nice shiny tin coat from is from this liquid tin compound and that protects the traces as well it's a very important thing to have on the traces because you know copper oxidizes very very fast and by doing this it you know it really helps preserve the circuit board and keep everything safe and it also makes it just a little bit easier to solder well this is so they say I find that it you know protects the traces I find that copper you know when it's in the state that it was there it you know it solders very very nicely but you know this stuff here it's a good thing to do just to preserve the copper on the circuit board and then what you do is you just let this set for about five minutes or so and after you're done what you do is you get a little funnel and you very carefully put this back into the bottle again and you can use the liquid tin over and over and over and over again I've probably used this bottle oh I can't I can't imagine how many times so it's uh you know that I've had this bottle for years and years so it works very very well and it keeps on pinning so that's how my circuit boards get that nice little uh that tin coat on them well I hope you enjoyed this little circuit board tutorial if you did you can let me know by giving me a big thumbs up hang around there'll be more stuff like this coming up in the very near future so take care bye for now you

Channel: Mr Carlson's Lab

Views: 360,025

Rating: 4.893311 out of 5

Keywords: Printed Circuit Board, Electronic Circuit (Literature Subject), Electronics (Field Of Study), How-to (Website Category), creativedesigncomponents.com, Creative Design Components, make a circuit board, build a circuit board, circuit board hack, make a PC Board, make a pcb at home, liquid tin, FR4, FR-4, ferric chloride, toner transfer method

Id: au2ba5gWLWk

Length: 55min 2sec (3302 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2015