A few people have asked me if my laser could be used to make printed circuit boards and my answer has always been no. The problem is that copper is such a good reflector at the CO2 wavelength of 10600nm that possibly a kilowatt or more of power (certainly more than I have) would be necessary to vaporize the copper and then it would almost certainly vaporize the glass board underneath as well.
Like all things there is always more than one way of doing everything so as an alternative approach, and being a slack day, I tried this;
The copper clad glass board was sprayed with a rattle can car spray paint then, when dry, the required pattern was laser etched (paint removed) using the Mach3 Impact/Laser plugin. I didn’t quite get this one aligned correctly horizontally but it proves the point that as a system it will work. The car spray paint is resistant to the ferric chloride pcb etchant so all I need to do now is chemically etch away the unwanted copper, drill the holes and clean off the remaining paint. It only took a few minutes to produce this, certainly less time than it will take to etch.
I think this system would be more suited to surface mount rather than through hole because there is no X – Y GCode a drilling file cannot be easily produced and drilling by hand is a real pain when you have a CNC machine sitting idle.
I doubt that this application had been envisaged when the Mach3 Impact/Laser plugin was written.
Tweakie.
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