Solder Stencil Done Three Ways

June 6, 2025 by Matt Varian 29 Comments

This project, sent in by [Henk], goes through a few different ways to make a solder stencil using a vinyl cutter, a CO2 laser, and a fiber laser.

The project starts with identifying a method to convert the board’s Gerber files to a PNG, which is ultimately used to create a vector file for use with the laser. The first stencil, made with the CO2 laser, was cut out of masking tape. This worked fine for larger cutouts and is certainly a cheap option if you don’t have too many small components. A slightly better approach with the CO2 laser was using vinyl sheet release paper, which seemed to hold together better than the tape.

Laser-cut masking tape works, but not for long.

A vinyl cutter was also used as an experiment, but it didn’t perform as well as the CO2 laser, as expected, since the cutter uses a knife rather than light, leading to some tearing issues.

The final method utilized a fiber laser and an empty drink can to create a metal stencil. First, the can had to be cut open, heated, and flattened. The fiber laser was able to cut clean footprints in the aluminum, creating a stencil that would hold up to more use than the paper variations.

The finale of this exploration into laser stencil making was using the fiber laser to solder the board together. The stencil was used to spread paste on the pads, parts were placed on the board, and then the fiber laser heated the solder paste to solder them to the board. The board looked a bit toasty afterwards, but we imagine the process could be fine-tuned to reduce the collateral damage a bit.

Once you’ve got your stencil ready to go, you can combine it with a 3D printed jig to hold the PCB while you apply the solder paste.

Depositing Metal On Glass With Fiber Laser

June 2, 2025 by Tyler August 17 Comments

Fiber lasers aren’t nearly as common as their diode and CO2 cousins, but if you’re lucky enough to have one in your garage or local makerspace, this technique for depositing thin films of metals in [Breaking Taps] video, embedded below, might be worth checking out.

It’s a very simple hack: a metal shim or foil is sandwiched between two pieces of glass, and the laser is focused on the metal. Etching the foil blasts off enough metal to deposit a thin film of it onto the glass. From electron microscopy, [Breaking Taps] reveals that what’s happening is that microscopic molten metal droplets are splashing up to the ̶m̶e̶t̶a̶l̶ glass, rather than this being any kind of plasma process like sputtering. He found this technique worked best with silver of all the materials tested, and there were a few. While copper worked, it was not terribly conductive — he suggests electroplating a thicker layer onto the (probably rather oxidized) copper before trying to solder, but demonstrates soldering to it regardless, which seems to work.

This might be a neat way to make artistic glass-substrate PCBs. More testing will be needed to see if this would be worth the effort over just gluing copper foil to glass, as has been done before. [Breaking Taps] suspects, and we agree, that his process would work better under an inert atmosphere, and we’d like to see it tried.

One thing to note is that, regardless of atmosphere, alloys are a bit iffy with this technique, as the ‘blast little drops off’ process can cause them to demix on the glass surface. He also reasons that ‘printing’ a large area of metal onto the glass, and then etching it off would be a more reliable technique than trying to deposit complex patterns directly to the glass in one go. Either way, though, it’s worth a try if you have a fiber laser.

Don’t have a fiber laser? Maybe you could build one.

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Fiber Laser Gives DIY PCBs A Professional Finish

April 7, 2025 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

While low-cost professional PCB fabrication has largely supplanted making circuit boards at home, there’s still something to be said for being able to go from design to prototype in an afternoon. Luckily we aren’t limited to the old toner transfer trick for DIY boards these days, as CNC routers and powerful lasers can be used to etch boards quickly and accurately.

But there’s still a problem — those methods leave you with a board that has exposed traces. That might work in a pinch for a one-off, but such boards are prone to shorts, and frankly just don’t look very good. Which is why [Mikey Sklar] has been experimenting with applying both a soldermask and silkscreen to his homemade boards.

The process he describes starts after the board has already been etched. First he rolls on the soldermask, and then sandwiches the board between layers of transparency film and clear acrylic before curing it under a UV light. After two coats of the soldermask, the board goes into a fiber laser and the silkscreen and mask layers are loaded into the software and the machine is set to a relatively low power (here, 40%). The trick is that the mask layer is set to run four times versus the single run of the silkscreen, which ensures that the copper is fully exposed.

Since the board doesn’t need to be moved between operations, you don’t have to worry about the registration being off. The end result really does look quite nice, with the silkscreen especially popping visually a lot more than we would have assumed.

We’ve previously covered how [Mikey] uses his CNC router and fiber laser to cut out and etch the boards, so this latest installment brings the whole thing full circle. The equipment you’ll need to follow along at home isn’t cheap, but we can’t argue with the final results.

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CNC Router And Fiber Laser Bring The Best Of Both Worlds To PCB Prototyping

March 4, 2025 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

Jack of all trades, master of none, as the saying goes, and that’s especially true for PCB prototyping tools. Sure, it’s possible to use a CNC router to mill out a PCB, and ditto for a fiber laser. But neither tool is perfect; the router creates a lot of dust and the fiberglass eats a lot of tools, while a laser is great for burning away copper but takes a long time to burn through all the substrate. So, why not put both tools to work?

Of course, this assumes you’re lucky enough to have both tools available, as [Mikey Sklar] does. He doesn’t call out which specific CNC router he has, but any desktop machine should probably do since all it’s doing is drilling any needed through-holes and hogging out the outline of the board, leaving bridges to keep the blanks connected, of course.

Once the milling operations are done, [Mikey] switches to his xTool F1 20W fiber laser. The blanks are placed on the laser’s bed, the CNC-drilled through holes are used as fiducials to align everything, and the laser gets busy. For the smallish boards [Mikey] used to demonstrate his method, it only took 90 seconds to cut the traces. He also used the laser to cut a solder paste stencil from thin brass shim stock in only a few minutes. The brief video below shows the whole process and the excellent results.

In a world where professionally made PCBs are just a few mouse clicks (and a week’s shipping) away, rolling your own boards seems to make little sense. But for the truly impatient, adding the machines to quickly and easily make your own PCBs just might be worth the cost. One thing’s for sure, though — the more we see what the current generation of desktop fiber lasers can accomplish, the more we feel like skipping a couple of mortgage payments to afford one.

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Lathe And Laser Team Up To Make Cutting Gear Teeth Easier

February 14, 2025 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

Fair warning: watching this hybrid manufacturing method for gear teeth may result in an uncontrollable urge to buy a fiber laser cutter. Hackaday isn’t responsible for any financial difficulties that may result.

With that out of the way, this is an interesting look into how traditional machining and desktop manufacturing methods can combine to make parts easier than either method alone. The part that [Paul] is trying to make is called a Hirth coupling, a term that you might not be familiar with (we weren’t) but you’ve likely seen and used. They’re essentially flat surfaces with gear teeth cut into them allowing the two halves of the coupling to nest together and lock firmly in a variety of relative radial positions. They’re commonly used on camera gear like tripods for adjustable control handles and tilt heads, in which case they’re called rosettes.

To make his rosettes, [Paul] started with a block of aluminum on the lathe, where the basic cylindrical shape of the coupling was created. At this point, forming the teeth in the face of each coupling half with traditional machining methods would have been tricky, either using a dividing head on a milling machine or letting a CNC mill have at it. Instead, he fixtured each half of the coupling to the bed of his 100 W fiber laser cutter to cut the teeth. The resulting teeth would probably not be suitable for power transmission; the surface finish was a bit rough, and the tooth gullet was a little too rounded. But for a rosette, this was perfectly acceptable, and probably a lot faster to produce than the alternative.

In case you’re curious as to what [Paul] needs these joints for, it’s a tablet stand for his exercise machine. Sound familiar? That’s because we recently covered his attempts to beef up 3D prints with a metal endoskeleton for the same project.

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Perfecting 20 Minute PCBs With Laser

January 5, 2025 by Al Williams 40 Comments

Normally, you have a choice with PCB prototypes: fast or cheap. [Stephen Hawes] has been trying fiber lasers to create PCBs. He’s learned a lot which he shares in the video below. Very good-looking singled-sided boards take just a few minutes. Fiber lasers are not cheap but they are within range for well-off hackers and certainly possible for a well-funded hackerspace.

One thing that’s important is to use FR1 phenolic substrate instead of the more common FR4. FR4 uses epoxy which will probably produce some toxic fumes under the laser.

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DIY Fiber Laser Adds Metal Cutting To The Mix

January 13, 2023 by Dan Maloney 28 Comments

Sadly, the usual CO₂-powered suspects in the DIY laser cutter market are woefully incapable of cutting metal. Sure, they’ll cut the heck out of plywood and acrylic, and most will do a decent job at engraving metal. But cutting through a sheet of steel or aluminum requires a step up to much more powerful fiber laser cutters. True, the costs of such machines can be daunting, but not daunting enough for [Travis Mitchell], who has undertaken a DIY fiber laser cutter build that really caught our eye.

Right off the bat, a couple of things are worth noting here. First — and this should be obvious from the fountains of white-hot sparks in the video below — laser cutters are dangerous, and you should really know what you’re doing before tackling such a build. Second, just because [Travis] was able to cut costs considerably compared to a commercial fiber laser cutter doesn’t mean this build was cheap in absolute terms — he reports dropping about $15,000 so far, with considerable ongoing costs to operate the thing.

That said, there doesn’t appear to be anything about this build that anyone with some experience building CNC machines wouldn’t be able to tackle. The CNC side of this is pretty straightforward, although we note that the gantry, servos, and controller seem especially robust.

The laser itself is an off-the-shelf machine, a Raycus RFL-C1000 fiber laser and head that packs a 1,000-Watt punch. There’s also the required cooling system for the laser, and of course there’s an exhaust system to get rid of the nasty fumes.

All that stuff requires a considerable investment, but we were surprised to learn how much the consumables cost. [Travis] opted for bottled gas for the cutter’s gas assist system — low-pressure oxygen for carbon steel and high-pressure nitrogen for everything else. Refills are really pricey, in part because of the purity required, but since the proper compressor for the job is out of the budget for now, the tanks will have to do. And really, the thing cuts like a dream. Check out the cutting speed and precision in the video below.

This is but the first in a series of videos that will detail the build, and if [Travis] thought this would whet our appetites for more, he was right. We really haven’t seen many DIY fiber laser builds, but we have seen a teardown of a 200-kW fiber laser that might tickle your fancy.

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