Re: milling pc boards

>From: Andrew Werby <drewid@...

>>Do consider thought that you will be trading etchant disposal hassles
>>for airborne fiberglass dust concerns if you go the trace milling
>>route. Perhaps you can use plastic board material, or build a good
>>dust collector.

>[Good point- I'm not very fond of fiberglass dust. Where does one get blank
>plastic boards, and do they work as well as fiberglass ones? Do they sag
>when they get warm? They would probably be easier on the tooling.]

We use an LKPF PCB router at work. It is in a smart cabinet and is quite
noisy. The reason is easily found if you look around the back there is a
Hoover vacuum cleaner. It starts automatically when the spindle is rotating
and sucks from around the mill tip. Keeps the boards nice and clean. The
results are impressive and allow us to produce surface mount prototype
boards very quickly.

With so many components now only available in surface mount the writting is
on the wall for the home electronics dabler who can only cope with through
hole components, surface mount and veroboard (or plugboard) are not
compatible! Hence my lurking on this list. I am starting to build a small
router for home use. So far one axis exists and I am trying to work out a
simple way of registering the position of the carriage before building the
second axis.

Regards
Bill Phillips