dozens of boxes of paperwork: the gift that keeps on giving.

[rmd]

i got a call from one of my dad's clients the other night, looking for more paperwork -- i'd given him a box of stuff from my dad's office back in jan, but apparently there are some 941's missing. so yesterday i went to the cape with my neice and visited my stepmother and ventured down into the basement full of loosely constructed metal shelves full of questionably labelled boxes of paperwork that was mostly lumped together. found one for the restaurant in question and another labelled as being for the folks who bought the restaurant but actually appeared to be from the era i was looking for.

proof i have moments of smart: as i was picking up the boxes, i noticed the cardboard was really brittle and weak. so i very cleverly put both boxes into large garbage bags so that if either one broke while i was hefting it up the ladder/stairs thru the trap door up to the main floor of the house, i wouldn't have to spent the next hour picking up pieces of paper and wondering if i got it all.

i made it thru one of the boxes while my stepmother and neice were off running errands, and sorted out the few things that were misfiled. i still have another box to go through in the next few days before i can cart it all over to stoughton to the client in question.

hopefully this will be it for paperwork hunts.

i think the next step is to go thru the boxes in the basement, pull out things from the 1970s and 1980s and shred that. probably over the summer so i can do it with the basement door open and get fresh air in there.

meanwhile, i think i may go experiment with some home chemistry today. or at least experiment with resists. wtf is wrong with youdoit electronics that they don't have the press-n-peel resist stuff that you feed thru a laser printer and then iron onto the board?

Comments

[srakkt.livejournal.com]

you-do-it really seems to cater more to the home wiring folks and the Hams - most of whom don't seem to build their own boards anymore.

As it turns out, the 'press-n-peel' type resists are notable only in that the toner doesn't bond very well to them. the only thing going onto your copper-clad board is the toner.

So if you've got some really glossy magazine paper that you can feed through your printer, that usually works - particularly if you soak the paper and futz with peeling it off very carefully and such.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

oh, they don't even cater to ham radio folks, really. i_leonardo's duck put it well the other night -- he pointed out that every time he went there, they always had something that was not quite what he was looking for.

they did have some board etching supplies, but the only resist type stuff they had was copper clad boards covered with a UV sensitive resist.

i have some transparencies rated for laser printer, and i ran one of them thru and it worked pretty well with an iron. i let it sit in ferric chloride for a while and it came out okay for a first attempt. i'm uploading pix to flickr now before i make a post about them.

[lioritgioret.livejournal.com]

Sympathy hug.

[frobzwiththingz.livejournal.com]

wtf is wrong with youdoit electronics that they don't have the press-n-peel resist stuff that you feed thru a laser printer and then iron onto the board?

fascinating. I've also been just recently making boards too. I've been getting acceptable results using my laser printer, printing onto generic Staples brand glossy photo paper, ironing on to the board, and then soaking it in water for a while and peeling the paper off in layers.

I've also been playing with acid cupric chloride as an etchant. It's very fast, and clear/translucent so much easier to gauge etching progress. But i have not been having good luck doing the air/oxygen regeneration yet, and the solution rapidly loses it's oxygen saturation, so while i would get excellent results and board etched in 3 minutes on Monday when the solution was mixed, by Tuesday evening the same solution would take 2 hours to etch a board. The toner does not resist the Hcl/Peroxide mix as well as ferric chloride, so if the board doesn't etch quickly, the results are crap.

I've switched back to ferric chloride for the time being, but will continue to experiment with the hcl/peroxide system on the side to see if i can work the bugs out.

I'm thinking of trying to run baking parchment paper through the laser printer to see if that yields an easier-to-remove-from-the-board-after-soaking result.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

re: oxygenation -- would something like an aquarium bubbler help?

[thalx.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend:

http://www.pulsarprofx.com/pcb/a_Pages/3_Direct_Etch/3a_The_Technique/The_Technique.html

You can buy the transfer paper (and reactive foil) from mouser.com, and probably other places.

At work about a year ago I got to experiment with this; we have T-tech board etching machines, but I was working with a prototype antenna that would take a technician about 6 hours to route; with this system I could edit, print, etch, and chamber-test about 3 iterations a day.

---

My trials & tribulations:

1) I went thru every laserprinter in the company until I found one that would print toner dark enough (otherwise I was left with swiss-cheese traces, because no toner is 100% dense).

2) Use the reactive foil. Really. Keep that copper where it belongs.

3) I tried 2 different brands of laminators until I got one I could tweak to a decent combination of heat and pressure, for decent toner adhesion.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

cool, thanks!

A peek at the work

[thalx.livejournal.com]

Here is the particular case in question... once I got things working oderately well.

http://picasaweb.google.com/chris.thalx/TonerTransfer?authkey=QDwjX6i4Bc0#