Arrgh! Now I'm fed up with you guys trying to do charge-pickup printing to a conducting plate when it can be done much simpler... OK, what I'd like to see is a system using laser to heat/melt copper powder so that it sticks to a bare fiberglass board. To do this you will first have to coat the board and that wouldn't be hard as fine grained copper acts a bit sticky by itself and youy can simply distribute it aboput evenly over the board and press it down with a roller. Now... To heat the copper we use a laser. The cool thing now is that we can either do raster mode, or we can do vector-based tracing. The latter would give great control :-) Problem is getting a laser powerful enough. If it's focused finely enough this shouldn't be too big a problem... Whaddya think ? Kyrre ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dale Botkin" To: Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 7:48 PM Subject: Re: [EE]: Printer to PCB? > On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Robert Rolf wrote: > > > The charge is stored and imaged on the DRUM inside the toner > > cartridge. It is then transfered to the paper, which is why you need a > > bit of flex there. They don't store charge on the paper because it's > > just too hard to control the conductivity between reams (humidity > > varies all over the place). > > Good point. I wonder, though, what effect a solid copper sheet hitting > the charged drum surface would have. Also in a normal laser > printer/copier setup, the paper is charged before being pressed against > the drum. > > In short, while there may be a theoretical way to get it to work, I > strongly suspect the practical difficulties in getting a laser printer > modified to print on copperclad board will be far too great for the > average (or even above average) person. The process depends completely on > controlled electrostatic charges, and I think the presence of a sheet of > copper is going to disrupt things beyond the point where you can get a > conumer grade laser to deal with it. Of course I could be wrong, don't let > me stop anyone from trying, but good luck. I've spent far too many hours > in the bowels of lasers (from LJ-I to Xerox 3700, 8700, 9700, Siemens > 1km/hr continuous feed cold fusion, you name it) just to get them to print > on various types of *paper* reliably. Remember, the end result has to be > not just toner on copper, but a near perfect image. > > Dale > > -- > http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList > mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu > > > -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu