[Mikey Sklar] had a problem—namely, running low on the brass material typically used for making PCB stencils. Thankfully, a replacement material was not hard to find. It turns out you can use aluminum business card blanks to make viable PCB stencils.
Why business card blanks? They’re cheap, for a start—maybe 15 cents each in quantity. They’re also the right thickness, at just 0.8 mm, and they’re flat, unlike rolled materials that can tend to flip up when you’re trying to spread paste. They’re only good for small PCBs, of course, but for many applications, they’ll do just fine.
To cut these, you’ll probably want a laser cutter. [Mikey] was duly equipped in that regard already, which helped. Using a 20 watt fiber laser at a power of 80%, he was able to get nice accurate cuts for the stencils. Thanks to the small size of the PCBs in question, the stencils for three PCBs could be crammed on to a single card.
If you’re not happy with your existing PCB stencil material, you might like to try these aluminium blanks on for size. We’ve covered other stenciling topics before, too.
Aluminum ?
Then :
Helum
Lithum
Sodum
Potassum
Silicum
Germanum
Radum
Uranum
Plutonum
…
Hey, at least we left the ‘I’ in ‘colonies’ for you.
“former colonies”… if you don’t mind ;-)
We even helped you get rid of your colonizer.
You should be more grateful – (c)JDV… ;-)
Some things are just too complicated for the colonals. For example, in automotive racing they couldn’t grasp the concept of braking and turning so they invented NASCAR where the only rule is to drive straight for a couple of hours.
My dad always pronounced it a-lu-na-min so I’ve had to deal with 3 different ways my whole life.
it’s called amelinium because it can’t be painted
American English: Aluminum*
Rest of the English-speaking world: Aluminium
American English: Color
Rest of the English-speaking world: Colour
Since HaD primary readers are based in the US, it is totally understandable that they would use American spellings.
The name of the element was recorded with the spelling given by the chemist who discovered it in the USA. Elsewhere, the chemist’s spelling was changed to conform with the endings of other elements. Which was the right thing to do ?
What??? The first to suppose the existence of the metal and give it a name was Humphry Davy (Britain Chemist). He deduced the metal was present in Alun (with sodium and potassium) and named it Aluminium. Then 14 years later, there’s a French guy Pierre Berthier that finds large aluminium oxide mines in Baux de Provence. Then again, 4 years later, Hans Christian Ørsted (Danish chemist) succeed in producing some impure form of it in a lab. Finally, 21 years later, another French guy Henri Sainte-Claire Deville has succeeded in purifying it and make the first ingot, using only chemistry. There’s no USA involved here anywhere. In 1846, the USA was starting to prepare for secession war, it was middle age in the (far) west.
So the right thing to do is to learn history, stop spreading fake news, and use the appropriate terms and not your local slang when speaking about scientific stuff.
I can see how that can easily be misread, sorry:
In the USA the name of the element was recorded with the spelling given by the chemist who discovered it.
“There’s no USA involved here anywhere. ”
Check those history books you mentioned for Charles Martin Hall. He’s one of the reasons your crown jewels aren’t set in “aluminium” gum wrappers.
Actually – Humphry Davy named it ‘Aluminum’ in his book “Elements of Chemical Philosophy” published in 1812 where he described his discovery. This was the common name in use for a decade or so until some other scientists decided to rename it, probably because they were not anywhere near as cool as Humphry Davy.
Once again, you English merely invented the language.
We Americans perfected it.
ducks
…this from a person who likely keeps their spare “tyre,” not in the trunk, but in their “boot,” and whose engine resides, not under a hood, but under their “bonnet.”
LOL… or if you prefer, LOL-ium.
I’m sure you also use tantalium capacitors, platinium catalysts, molybdenium grease, and lanthanium, um, whatever the hell you do with lanthanum.
Wanker.
Ok, I’m thinking Tom Lehrer…
aluminium: British English
aluminum: simplified English (Indeed simplified as there’s one letter missing!)
SCNR ;-)
Writing Al instead is not better nowadays. Many might understand something artificial because a lowercase L is hard to distinguish from an uppercase I. ;-)
0.8mm is way, way too thick for fine pitch SMD work. You want closer to 0.08-0.2mm
Love how the US-vs-British English war kicked off in a blaze of glory and nobody mentioned how insanely thick 0.8mm is for a stencil. To me it seems that it would not work for the vast majority of fine pitch and QFN packages.
Exactly. 0.8 would be too think for even 0805??? For a better source for larger and thinner material, look at at hardware store display or craft store that carries “ksmetals”. You can get a sheet of 4″x8″ material (brass IIRC). It’s home etches wonderfully – the chemical way, not the laser way – that I don’t know about that method. All ya all are gonna get some new type of lung cancer running those machines.