throbscottle
Well-Known Member
My toner transfer technique has improved a lot since my "squashed caterpillar" as tvtech called it. I just made this set of little adapter boards, 8 and 16 pin soic to dil (admittedly 0.4" pitch) and ssop to dil. The tracks on the 16pin one and the ssop one are 0.015" or 0.381mm, the spacing between them is 0.01" or 0.254mm. I reckon I could get down to under 0.01" wide with no problem, at least for short segments anyway. Couple of shorts on this board, no opens, so minimal adjustment required.
I'm now using cheap yellow toner transfer paper from China - it seems to be like label backing paper but with a polymer on the shiny side rather than wax. Lowering the heat of the iron helped too. The challenge, I reckon, is getting just the right temperature, to be able to improve it further. A couple of tracks seemed to get squished out a bit (you can see on the photo where I trimmed them back) so I might try lowering the printer resolution.
The pins come from an old header plug pulled from a board. I put the thing on the breadboard and put the pins through to hold them whilst soldering. Worked pretty well and I didn't melt the breadboard!
I'm now using cheap yellow toner transfer paper from China - it seems to be like label backing paper but with a polymer on the shiny side rather than wax. Lowering the heat of the iron helped too. The challenge, I reckon, is getting just the right temperature, to be able to improve it further. A couple of tracks seemed to get squished out a bit (you can see on the photo where I trimmed them back) so I might try lowering the printer resolution.
The pins come from an old header plug pulled from a board. I put the thing on the breadboard and put the pins through to hold them whilst soldering. Worked pretty well and I didn't melt the breadboard!