I do this, but with matte photo paper. I didn’t get great results with magazine paper (or I didn’t have the right magazines). Anyways, I spent the money and bought Epson matte photo paper and it’s been working great.

I decased my laminator to allow for larger and smaller boards. Smaller boards wouldn’t come out, and larger boards wouldn’t fit it.

You do have to run them through a good 8-10 times though. And they come out pretty hot.

Posted at 8:17 am on Jun 26th, 2008 by adam

Great tip. I will have to try this as the result look good. I’ll give both the magazine paper and matte photo paper as noted in comment 1 a try. Cheers

Posted at 8:30 am on Jun 26th, 2008 by DIY Audio Projects

i use a laminator as well and i, too, could not get magazine paper to work. i use glossy paper (the kind *without* water protection, that is very important as you have to remove the paper by soaking it) which works great.

i run my boards through about 15-20 times as i found that boards wouldn’t etch completely if i did it less. at any rate, using a laminator is much much better than a clothes iron, i can’t stress that enough. i used to have problems etching boards with dip ic’s with a clothes iron, now with the laminator i do surface mount soldering with tssop ic packages just fine.

Posted at 8:35 am on Jun 26th, 2008 by andrew

oh and i also tried canon matte photo paper, and it didnt work for me either.

Posted at 8:37 am on Jun 26th, 2008 by andrew

Looks like the site has been sucked down

Posted at 10:56 am on Jun 26th, 2008 by Irritant

To those who have done this: What brand/model laminator is good for this sort of thing?

Posted at 11:34 am on Jun 26th, 2008 by Brian

FUCK YOU miked

Posted at 12:23 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by miked_hater

magazine or very thin paper is a must, but i don’t use lamination rather i use to stop the printer just before the paper with the toner is reaching the fixation unit in the printer, then in very slowly i can remove the paper with the unfixed/burned toner, so to transfer this to pcb is very easy

but i rather use photo-echting cause this methode is more superior, but sure a bit time consuming

Posted at 1:10 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by alfcoder

in other news: wtf is happening with the piratebay?

Posted at 2:59 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by spiderwebby

the one you see in the picture is the laminator from walmart.

29$ canadian

I bought it months ago to test it never got to make it work it the special PCB paper. I never tried it with photo paper or magasine.

I think the printer makes a big job too. Be sure that the printer puts a lot of toner on it! I have tried different setting with no luck.

Posted at 4:19 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by Jerome Demers

I use a royal sovereign NR-1201
xxx.royalsovereign.com/product/e_pro1_NR-1201.asp

I’ve had it over a year and it works great. It has adjustable temperature but I have always used the highest setting. Also the rollers are spring loaded, not sure how unique this is but it probably helps since pcbs are thicker than what the machine was designed for. Also be sure and use 1/16” pcbs, when I started using this method I took me awhile to figure out that the thinner pcbs I was using was the reason my board were not coming out right… wasn’t getting enough pressure.

Posted at 4:38 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by PlatinumT

brian: i have a royal sovereign rpa-5254 found on ebay for $60 usd new.

Posted at 5:46 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by andrew

>FUCK YOU miked

where did that come from? i haven’t even posted since yesterday.

Posted at 6:59 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by miked

Does anyone else find it amusing that googlepages.com has pulled the page due to exceeded data limits, but google.com is happy enough to serve up the cached version of the page? Albeit without photos, but still…
And miked, that was probably a preemptive strike. Which appears to have worked well.

Posted at 7:59 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by Snaptastic

Not to take anything away from the featured site, but hasn’t Don Lancaster been doing this for at least a decade? Search tinaja.com for “kroy color”.

Part of the problem may be that even though I’ve been reading Don since Radio-Electronics days, I don’t think he has exactly gone into a lot of detail of what a “kroy color machine” is.

Posted at 9:57 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by Standard Mischief

“Place board into etch solution. Note the few wraps of tape on the edges to space the board off the bottom for faster etching.”

If you are using Eagle Cad – look at doing “Ground pouring”. Basically you use all possible space for ground, there giving you a lot faster etch time and, well, a better ground plane. Very helpful in Audio/RF IIRC.

Posted at 11:59 pm on Jun 26th, 2008 by EllisGL

> >fuck you miked

> where did that come from? i haven’t even posted since yesterday.

Because you eventually did.

Posted at 5:25 am on Jun 27th, 2008 by ericwertz