Last October, I was playing around with making my own PC board. I had read about the toner transfer method and decided to give it a try. It took me a couple of experiments to learn how to get the toner to transfer well to the board using an ordinary iron. I did not try the glossy photo paper as I had read that those kinds of paper had been changed in some way that rendered their performance poor for this purpose. Instead, the thin paper used in many magazine advertisements works pretty well, especially those printed only in black, not with colors.
A friend had given me an old Brother laser printer that he was about to pitch out. Despite reading that Brother toner did not work well for this technique, I tried it anyway.
On the first attempt, the toner did not transfer completely enough to the copper. So I used a solvent to remove it and tried again. The second time it worked pretty well for me. Here is what the copper clad board looked like with the toner transferred to it and then the paper removed using water:
- Toner Transfer To Copper.JPG (22.01 KiB) Viewed 5511 times
After the board was etched using Radio Shack Ferric Chloride that had sat on my shelf for more than 20 years, this was the result:
- Now In Copper.JPG (85.08 KiB) Viewed 5511 times
I decided that was good enough and populated the board and have successfully used it.
NCR once refused to hire me because I was too short. I'm still waiting on my growth spurt.