Author Archives: Chris Holden

It seems that we spend most of our time planning things while we wait for stuff to arrive for an earlier project. That’s certainly the case now, as we’re waiting for some silkscreen mesh to arrive to try out our miniature silkscreen for printing PCBs i… Continue reading →

We battled with this one for a while – trying to decide on the best/easiest layout for silkscreen printing. In our previous post, the video shows “traditional” silkscreen printing, with a large screen and plenty of workshop space.We’re trying for small… Continue reading →

For a number of years, we’ve been thinking about the future of production and manufacturing. While everyone else seems to be “scaling up” and embracing globalisation, perhaps we’re been a little perverse in going the other way. Or maybe we’re just “ahe… Continue reading →

We’ve been doing a lot of trying things out lately, and not a lot of actually getting much done. But sometimes that’s ok, if only to satisfy your own curiosity. One thing that’s been bugging me is how close we got to making some really useful pcbs with… Continue reading →

We went crazy today and splashed out on a new laser printer. The big old Xerox is getting costly to keep buying consumables for, so we got a cheap, compact Brother HL2130 from PC World.Yup, it was extravagant. Yes, we could have got one cheap… Continue reading →

We’ve made about half a dozen different PCBs using our laser etching and laser cutting methods for creating the etch-resistant mask. And while creating the actual mask is relatively straightforward – compared with press-n-peel or exposing photo-sensiti… Continue reading →

This time we tried making a PCB with no “filled plane” between traces. Normally we flood fill all the spaces between traces, just so that the ferric doesn’t have as much exposed copper to etch away. But out of interest, we made up a PCB with no ground … Continue reading →

Our laser-cut pcbs were certainly quicker to make than using laser-etching (we converted the pcb image to vector and cut out from around the traces rather than using the laser to etch a rasterized bitmap image) and the ferric chloride made a great job … Continue reading →

It’s cold and wet and the nerd cupboard seems such a long way away, and we’ve a pcb here that needs etching. Making up a batch of ferric seems like a bad idea, and storing it in the house could be a pain. What to do?On one of the instructables pages, s… Continue reading →

Well, our last post created a bit of interest – although some of it was just asking for clarification: we’re not really etching the PCB with the laser cutter – it’s still a copper clad board and the laser cutter still can’t cut through anything metalli… Continue reading →