Personal Fabrication Tools

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by philso

It seems that you have acquired even more tools since the last time I said that you give me "shop envy"

Your girlfriend IS extremely cool. Hang on to her.

How well does the LPKF work?

I can usually put a trace between 2 through-hole pads on 0.100" centers with a properly installed new contouring tool. With some calibration they both hold 0.001" repeatable accuracy with incidental accuracy of 0.0001". Depending on the PCB material, quality of contour tool and my patience at setup I can make 0.001" traces. These do not have ATC so all tool changes are basically the user's headache. I have the pneumatic SMT paste dispensor attachments for both. I usually do through via with either a short wire, a press copper barrel, or a blob of silver paste from the dispensor (through-holes are usually plated and I do not like the chemicals around my house). I can do multi-layer by stacking thin copper clad and soldering through or using paste. These machines make it easy to test things at 3AM.

I recently did an RF board with a network analyzer as an accessory. Basically setup the process with short connectors on one end of the PCB then: cut, test, repeat till the PCB traces had the desired RF characteristics. Mostly because I wanted to see if I could make that work and it did: I made tuned traces, inductors, and even a really tiny value capacitor which was just a test. (Capacitors like this are usually sub-picoFarad and since the PCB is unsealed and composite PCB material absorbs moisture the value changes).

I have also cut thin stencils so I could screen print UV cure solder mask onto PCB. This is handy when I need to solder something where paste alone would migrate. I use my UV lamp box for curing that resin. My UV lamp box is a storage shelf with a wooden enclosure I made, a thermometer and a timer to run the bulbs. My solder oven is an old kitchen convection oven with better controls I made. My PCB cleaner is either my Chinese ultrasonic tank or the dish washer with a waste bucket to keep stuff out of the septic. (Keep in mind almost all commodity trading on Earth went through a system I made that was soldered in a toaster oven and cleaned in a dish washer. Those boards are 25 years old and still fully operational, even over-clocked by a few MHz. A little ingenuity and some testing saved me a ton of cost on an oven and cleaner.)