Make Your Own PCB
  1. Making Your Own Printed Circuit Board - An Overview, part 1
  2. Making Your Own Printed Circuit Board - An Overview, part 2

Making Your Own Printed Circuit Board – An Overview, part 2

In the first part of this article, we covered the extensive subject of imaging a design onto a blank board and the best way to etch that board. After completing these steps, you will have a PCB almost ready for assembly. I will now explain the remaining steps. Some are essential and some not so much. As usual, each has their own set of problems to overcome.

Drilling

Now that you have a nice shiny PCB with your traces and pads imprinted on it, you need to drill the holes for thru-hole components and vias. The easiest way to do this is with a desktop drill press. Since I don’t have a dedicated PCB fabrication setup, I found another easy method for drilling holes at home. Harbor freight sells a 12v powered Dremel-type tool. While this tool is way under-powered for most tasks, it turns out to be a virtue when drilling small PCB holes. I simply chuck up a #60 bit and the hole already etched in the copper pad provides a nice indentation to hold the bit steady. The low power prevents the drill from getting squirrelly and jumping out of the indentation. You can probably get similar results with a battery powered Dremel tool.

Amenities

At this point you have a PCB good enough to be assembled. Modern PCBs have some additional features that your board does not have. You can add these features yourself, but at extra cost in time and money.

Solder Mask

Solder mask is what gives commercial PCBs their solid coloring, frequently green. However, it serves another purpose besides simply coloring the board. It constrains the flow of solder to the pads where components are to go. It also insulates the board from any stray connection. The former property is most useful for surface mount components. The latter prevents inadvertent shorts from occurring in your finished board. You can buy your own solder mask paint from e-bay for about $5. Search for ‘UV Curable Solder Mask PCB Repairing Paint Green New’.

For home use, you probably won’t want to bother with solder mask. To prevent unwanted shorting, just examine your finished board and apply liquid electrical tape, hot glue or even latex paint wherever you see a point that might be at risk.

Silk Screen

Silk screening is the part of the process that provides those wonderful part outlines and labels for assembly. If you are making more than one board of a give design, you will probably want silkscreen. You have a few options available. The first is to buy ink-jet rub-on sheets. You can buy them here.

You can also use toner transfer for your silk screen layer and just leave the toner in place.

Tinning

Those nice shiny copper traces won’t be shiny for long. When they oxidize your board will be harder to solder and may even suffer from “cold solder joints”. The commercial solution to this problem is to tin the copper traces. You can buy tinning solution from solder suppliers. For home use, there is an easier solution. Just before you assemble your board, give it a good scrubbing with a Scotch-Brite pad. If you aren’t familiar with them, they are a modern replacement for steel wool. They last a long time and don’t shed iron fragments like the former will.  A minute of scouring with these pads will remove all oxidation and leave your board ready for soldering.

Vias

Vias are the dirty little secret seldom mentioned in articles on DIY printed circuit boards. Vias are another name for plated through holes. When doing double-sided boards, you must have plated through holes. Not only are they used for tunneling a trace from the one side to the other, but they are also needed for traces to run from either the top side of a component pin or the bottom side. This latter use is the most troublesome for home PCB makers.

In single-sided boards, all soldering is done on the bottom side. Ditto for through-hole components in commercial boards. In double-sided boards, in many cases a circuit trace may connect to the top side of a component pin. With a plated-through hole, the soldering can still be done on the bottom side as both sides are connected by copper going through the hole. Not only that, but the solder will wick through the hole, completely filling it and soldering the pin to the pads on both sides.

When you make your own boards, you have a problem unless they are single sided. You must solder the component pin to the pad on the side(s) where they trace connects. For most components like resistors and ICs, there is no problem except for more assembly work. For IC sockets, header pins and such, there is now a problem – a big problem. These components sit right down on the pad and cover it. You can no longer solder to the top-side pad, and solder won’t flow through the hole from the other side either. There are few solutions to this problem, and none of them are very good either.

The first solution is the one used decades ago before plated-through hole technology was developed – copper rivets. There are a couple of sources of rivet type materials described in this article, or you can try using a foil-type kit to do the same thing. Any of these solutions require a lot of time and money. I just can’t see using them, but I might try the foil type one day.

The second solution is to solder the component higher up off the board. This works so-so. Give it a go if you have nothing else to try.

The third solution I have read about is to apply a lot of heat and solder. Supposedly, given enough heat and solder, it will wick up to the top and spill over onto the pad. I have not been able to do this myself, but you might want to try it.

The best solution I have found is to use a commercial PCB service. I know that doesn’t help with home fabrication, but that is how things stand at the moment.

No matter what method you use for patterning your board, without a means of plating your holes you will run into this problem. Vias for switching trace layers are not a problem. For those you just insert a piece of wire and solder on both sides. Ditto for most component leads as well.

You might be asking (as I did) – “why not plate the holes yourself like the commercial houses do?” That is the only reliable way to deal with the issue, but the problem is it is not a DIY procedure. Not to say it isn’t possible, but that it isn’t cheap or easy. It took a long time to develop the technique in the beginning, and chemistry doesn’t change with technology. Sadly, it remains out of reach for the hobbyist. If you know a way to do it easily, prove me wrong and share your knowledge.

After writing this section, I thought some more about the problem, and have come up with a fourth possible approach. At the cost of some extra work soldering via wires to connect traces as they jump sides, it might just be a decent solution. When you route a trace on the top side to a through-hole component pin that you cannot access, simply switch your routing layer just before you reach the pin and connect to the bottom side of the pad. You will have a lot of extra vias, but it will be needed for at most 50% of the pins for those components that cover the board’s topside. You may also have to allow a little extra room on the board for all the extra vias – alongside ICs and headers.

Conclusion

There are many more resources and tutorials on home PCB fabrication than those mentioned in this article. I have tried to mention the more useful ones. I have also surveyed the various methods available so you can choose which one suits you the best. I have also addressed some of the most common problems and how to overcome them. The last problem – that of vias, remains unsolved. For this reason, I now favor using a commercial PCB service most of the time, but will be giving the fourth approach a try.

The main drawback of a commercial PCB service is when you need a board now. In such cases, you can either build your circuit on a perf-board and wire it up by hand, or make your own PCB. Making your own PCB is also the best option if you can’t afford even the modest cost of PCB prototyping services. I will cover these new services in another article. With a cost of less than $20, having a PCB made commercially is more available than ever.

Please share your experiences and favorite articles in the comments.

Making Your Own Printed Circuit Board – An Overview, part 2 by Provide Your Own is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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9 Comments

  1. Joshua
    Posted May 22, 2012 at 11:03 am | Permalink

    These are some great custom pcb solutions you have here, I need to bookmark this for later!

  2. birdmun
    Posted June 3, 2012 at 2:12 pm | Permalink

    Re: vias.
    Would not flux help conduct solder through a hole to the top side? My thinking would be coat both top and bottom, as well as, the via’d pins with flux and then solder the bottom as you normally would. Would that not work?

    • Posted June 3, 2012 at 10:03 pm | Permalink

      It would be worth a try, but my guess is it would be even worse. Whenever I want to remove solder bridging, extra flux usually helps the solder pool more on the pads. Since what we want is extra bridging, I think flux would actually be counter-productive. If you find that it does work, or any other technique, please post it.

  3. Posted July 27, 2012 at 2:11 am | Permalink

    what about using the liquid tin after you drill your vias, maybe even a little oversized, or extra small, experiment with it. im just thinking the tin will fill the vias just not sure if thats a good idea or not

  4. pcb newb
    Posted November 29, 2012 at 8:48 pm | Permalink

    On making vias… I saw one guy use copper electroplating to coat the inside of his vias with copper. He mixed carbon powder with fountain pen ink and coated the inside of the vias with it by covering one side of the vias by vacuuming it through to the other side. The carbon was conductive enough to act as a substrate for the copper during the copper electroplating process. You might also try conductive silver ink.

    Obviously you’d need to make your vias before you etch, and you’d also need to protect them with something to prevent them from being etched with the FeCl3.

    I haven’t tried copper electroplating myself yet, but it shouldn’t be too expensive.

    • Posted December 8, 2012 at 7:42 pm | Permalink

      Thanks for the good tip. I found someone doing something similar. He used conductive ink (using carbon powder) in the holes and then plating. For prototyping though, the extra steps may not be worth it.

      I have recently found a great way to solve the via problem for prototyping though. It is so trivial, I am surprised I didn’t think of it before. Before inserting the component, simply add a piece of bare copper wire in the hole and extend it out to the connected trace on the top side. When soldering the pin, solder the wire to it, and then solder the other end of the wire to the topside trace – neat and simple.

  5. Posted September 24, 2014 at 7:11 pm | Permalink

    Regarding vias, I use the excess trimmed resistor’s wire ends for the top side to bottom side connection. When I’m ready to begin soldering parts to the board, I start with the vias and a block of styrofoam first. Place the PCB bottom side down on the styrofoam, poke the scrap resistor wire end from the top pushing it into the styrofoam until the top side end protrudes about 1mm. Solder all your vias. Flip the PCB over and solder the other side. Your DIY vias are complete and you can now continue mounting and soldering the remaining parts.

  6. Posted May 26, 2016 at 2:27 am | Permalink

    Hi Scott! I Like your blog and surely say that this blog helps all new and experience in the PCB manufacturing industry. However , about me I am Bob Wettermann Principal of BEST Inc and had 18+ years experience in small business of PCB repair tools manufacturing. I am also a practicing instructor and have a passion for teaching in a variety of life skills as well as in soldering and PCB repair.

  7. James W Wing
    Posted January 30, 2017 at 11:31 pm | Permalink

    Hi Scott,
    I have just run across your site here and find it very helpful. I see that 4.5 years have elapsed, but I was surprised at your concern over feeding solder through on vias. I think I understand your concern, since the upper part of the pins are not available for soldering especially for DIP connectors and the like. I don’t see the problem for ICs and such, however, because their pins stick out alongside of the body.

    Anyway, if you have a trace going under something like a connector, using a hot soldering iron on the pin on the underside and applying the solder to the trace should make sure it gets filled. The problem is that when the pin is not in contact with the trace, it will lift the trace rather than draw the solder. Another problem is that if the solder gets too hot, the plastic in the connector begins to melt and the pin is released to slide up or down.

    Both of these problems can be overcome by filling the vias first – that is, solder the connector from the bottom first and then add solder from the top while continuing to heat the bottom. A little practice will get the trick down and you will have very little problem with lost contact due to cold solder joints. A little extra flux will help. The flux helps pool the solder because you are heating on the side that it pools to. But when you are heating a pin from below the flux helps the solder fill the gaps as it comes together and as it cools. Also the extra flux helps wick the solder up the pin until it hits the plastic of the component resulting in a completely full shiny solder joint that won’t break.

    The only reason I say a little practice is that you can’t tell when the process is starting as you are heating and all of a sudden the wicking occurs and once the wicking starts you want to get the heat off the pin and add just a little more solder to get the joint to set. It is a lot like making a copper to copper solder joint for plumbing.

    If you could get the heat to the trace on the top next to the connector while holding the solder underneath it would be more like the plumbing joint, but it probably cannot be done without damaging the connector. But this method does work as described above – you just have to recognize when to get the heat off of the pin.

    I still occasionally do some electronics work, but I’m a little too shaky. When I do, I use ttl and put the components into plastic sockets rather than mount them on the board. But for either one, you can get at the top side to solder the pins to the board. The only problem I have experienced is that if I hold the heat on the pin too long, the solder ends up wicking into the pinch pins of the socket and causes them to fail (stick). Sometimes I am able to break them loose with a screwdriver and a little heat, but usually they are damaged too much and have to be replaced.

    I might add that lifting the components up a little would certainly help because you could then get the soldering tip nearer to the via hole. Pre-wetting the tin with some extra solder will also help – just make sure it doesn’t interfere with the pin entering the hole. Then brush a little flux on the area and the solder will run in and fill it fully when heated with some additional solder. You might even pre-wet the pins on the component. All of these will help.

    Your ultimate solution of using professionally built boards is great, but where is the fun in that?

3 Trackbacks

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  • […] this Making Your Own PCB – traps and overcoming them If you inaugurate tinkering beside electronics, finally you devise covet to make your own printed round panel. In the olden ages you could befitting purchase an etching knapsack at your limited broadcast lean-to. Present, most electronic projects are very more elaborate, the commissions are ample smaller, and you demand to divide beside 2 sheets, top intensify members and ties. Instead than mortal legitimate more PCB tutorial, this immense twin fraction overview lids the countless of situations you might fight and the orders accessible for solving these complications. Making Your Own PCB – snares and overcoming them – Part1+Part2 […]

  • By PCB manufacturing tutorial | Share Blog on June 2, 2012 at 1:25 pm

    […] tool, but Hackaday has a favorite drill press that is perfect for drilling holes in FR-4. In part two of [Scott]‘s tutorial, he goes over solder masks, silk screens before jumping into vias. […]