Toner transfer etching

Has anyone here had good luck using toner-transfer techniques to mask a custom circuit board for etching? Any tricks, specifically for the transfer step?

Every website I read about it says it’s super easy, but I’ve been at it all week (Spring Break!!!) and I just can’t get the transfer to stick well everywhere. I prep my boards with fine sandpaper and acetone, and I’ve tried all sorts of recommended photo papers, and even got some real toner transfer paper, tried a clothes iron and a laminater, no luck. In some areas the pattern sticks great, but never all over.

At this point it would have been cheaper to get my board professionally made, but what fun is that?

-Adam

Hello,

My only experience is from around 15 years ago, and it wasn’t good. More recently, I had experience with LPKF’s milled PCB fabrication, and that still sucked (thought we were messing with two-sided boards and getting holes plated). Sub-$100 prototypes with solder mask and silkscreen are hard to beat!

It’s a spring-like 76 degrees here; isn’t “spring break” in February wishful thinking for Michigan?

- Jan

I’m having a little more luck now, but not much. It turns out my HP printer toner at work is a little better than my Xerox toner from home, but I’m also sad to say that glossy photopaper works 100 times better than the PCB toner transfer paper I paid $1 a sheet for, which is pretty useless!

I guess I was just excited about the possibility of putting my laser printer to work as a true rapid-fab machine! I did see something neat about laser-printing directly onto copper-clad sheets of kapton to etch your own flexi-PCB’s, but after how much this has turned out to suck I’m skeptical.

And yes, in Ann Arbor it’s been snowing most days this week, it’s snowing right now, were expecting a few inches overnight and more tomorrow. Actually right now we’re under a “Snow Advisory” which basically means it’s falling way faster than the department of transportation’s ability to deal with it. It’s a break anyway.

-Adam