Jason (Tse-Kang) Wang
How to make (almost) anything!

Experiment of

Alternative Ways to produce PCB

While I was producing PCB for week6's assignment, I got curious about other ways to make PCBs without chemical etching.

I stepped upon a Post that shows and interesting way to make custom transfers with very fine details onto nails. Although it's for nail art, I though the process might be able to produce PCB board by just swapping out the nail lacquer with conductive ink.

After some further research, the process seem to be a varient of Rotogravure Printing. With that in mind, I went to get the necessary equipments to try it out.

Rotogravure Printing PCB

Basic Equipment: stamp rubber, laser etched acrylic with PCB traces, conductive ink/pain/glue, something that can be used as squeegee to wipe off excessive ink/pain/glue. First, I laser etched the PCB traces onto a piece of acrylic. It's about 1mm deep.
I use Bare Paint Conductive paint since that's what I have on hand. And use a plastic card as the squeegee to wipe out the exessive pint. With only paint left in the traces on acrylic, I used the stamp rubber to transfer the PCB trace shaped paint onto a piece of clear plastic (in theory, can be any surface that's not conductive). The transfer process is to simply press the stamp rubber onto the paint filled acrylic to collect the paint, and use the same stamp rubber to stamp onto a surface of ur choice.

2

Immediately I notice a problem, the paint is too thick, and it's really hard to wipe off all exessive paint. I either took too long to wipe out the exessive paint and had the paint dried out before transfor, or made a mess because the exessive paint while transfer. These are actually my best two attempts.
These are actually my two best attemps out of about about a dozen tries. Even worse, the resistance of the traces that has been successfully transfered and dried are really high. Mostly due to how thine my traces are. The experiment is far from successful, but I do have some ideas that might improve the result. First, make the traces wider and also laser etch the traces deeper, so there are more paint to form the traces, hence lower resistance. Secondly, try other pain. Since the process was successfully used with nail lacquer, I'm thinking about mixing graphite powder with clear nail lacquer to form a new conductive paint to try.

Other interesting ways to make PCB without chemical etching

1.Laser Cut Conductive Fabric: Acording to this Post, many conductive fabrics can be laser cut, and some of them can even be solder on!
2.Laser Cut .001″ Steel Shim: Yup, acording to this Post, 0.001" steel shim can be laser cut with just 40W laser cutter and also solder on! The post believe it's due to the poor thermal conductivity of steel. Where cupper has a really good thermal conductivity which make it really hard if not impossible to cut with normal CO2 laser cutter. Even though steel is not as good a conductor as copper, it's still something interesting to try. I will try to find some 0.001" steel shim to give this a try and post my result later. That's it for now, at least untill I receive my graphite powder and steel shim.