God, people here seem to have no idea what is going on. It's a 3d printer with a pointed copper rod attached to the print head, it's not a CNC mill. He spread permanent marker across the copper clad board to act a chemical resist, preventing the etching solution from dissolving the copper. The rod on the printer is used to scrape off the marker in the areas he wants to be etched.
Where does the 3D printer come into this ? All I'm seeing is a cutter head cutting through etch resist. If we're going to do CNC cutting anyway, why not just use it to cut out the isolation between tracks in the copper, avoiding the unnecessary steps of adding etch resist and then etching ?
That's not a cutter head. He's attached a pointed piece of copper to the print head of his 3d printer and he's using that to scrape off the permanent marker that he's using as a chemical resist.
It is a 3d printer with a sharp point attached to it with a spring. At heart, a 3d printer is basically a fancy cnc machine lol The sharp point is removing only the marker (sharpie) layer on top and then it is put in an acid to remove the copper. The marker is acting as an etch resist :)
Below the black marker is a conductive metal, how do you keep the power from jumping traces if they all share a common conductive board/surface? You just scratched the surface rather than cut out the circuit? I'm confused.
It is confusing, yes. The cutter head is cutting the black marker pen, leaving the copper exposed. That copper is then etched away using FeCl. Where there is marker, the copper won't be etched away, because the marker is acting as resist. I was expecting to see a PCB pattern printed AS filament, and then the filament being used for etch resist.
It looks good actually but your project does not require a high precision with thin pads and tracks like i.e. QFM packages. The final precision will allways depend of the printer's precision. A 2D laser with CNC engraver should be sufficient and may be cheaper for the same final result meanwhile this solution would work for those who allready own a 3D printer.
Could you fix a very fine end mill to the printer and machine the unwanted copper away? You wouldn't need to make a mask or do any etching. This reminds me of the old X-Y plotter I had.
That can be done, but the dust is toxic (white lung disease) and it's really difficult to get the top surface of the board flat enough to get a good rout over the whole board without cutting very deeply in some areas; you're forced to rout deeply enough on one pass to guarantee full copper penetration everywhere, because each pass takes a long time and your carbide end mills wear out fairly quickly cutting glass fibers. Even phenolic is tough on tooling. And it's noisy. Can't do it in the house.
@@timhofstetter5654 That's why bCNC esist : a powerful free program with a "autolevelling" system, wich make a multiple measurement point on the whole copper surface so it drive the height of the spindle accordingly. In other words it works exactly like a 3D printer with a autolevelling sensor . You only need to plug couple wires on the CNC control board where one connect with the copper side and the other one to the carving tool . I totally agree about the noise and to the toxic dust . Health and relax came first :)
@@adrianoragazzo1321 Too bad it has autoleveling; that's a horrible addition to 3D printers. Very troublesome. I've helpd a lot of people remove it and replace it with a Z-axis limit switch. It just cannot be made to be reliable. I can see a lot of potential failure modes in any system that measures continuity through the foil on a PC board, too. Much better to use a ground-flat vacuum chuck.
