(Mostly) easy PCB manufacture

Step 6 Soak off the paper

Drop the hot board immediately into a pan of hot water, along with any of the paper towel that might be attached. Some of the paper will start to come off right away. Help it along! After a few minutes, more paper can be pulled off. Also peel off any scotch tape you used to hold the mask to the board. After 10-20 minutes, you'll be down to the last layer, which is more like plastic than paper. The traces will be clearly visible though it. Get a corner started, and the plastic should peel off easily, leaving you with a nicely masked board. If you've ironed well enough, the toner will be fused to the board solidly; it can't be scraped off with a fingernail.

If the traces are messed up in any way -- for example, if the iron slipped -- you can clean off the fused toner with acetone and start over with a fresh mask.

Comments

[pfred1]

Transferring the toner is the biggest pain with this process you should just use a product specifically designed for this purpose. Maybe I just suck at ironing? PnP Blue is what I use. I never just run the whole sheet through either. I run plain paper through my printer, then cut a piece of the PnP Blue oversized, Scotch tape that to the paper, where the board art is printed, then run it all through again. Printers are amazingly accurate. Like to a 600th of an inch. I can get maybe 6 3x5 boards out of one sheet of PnP Blue. That makes it an economical solution for me. Lately though my boards have been getting too detailed I need to switch to the photographic process here.
I have also heard that paper with "high clay content" is what you want to use. Also, that glossy magazine paper, light, with as little printing as possible on it works. I haven't tried either but have heard they work. Like I said earlier this step is such a pain I just don't like to mess around with it.
Here is a link to the real thing:
http://www.techniks.com/information.htm

[nickjohnson]

For me, it didn't work until the water was boiling, not just hot