I'm making a PCB! (Printed Circuit Board)

[MildredHubble]

Trying to push myself to do something at least somewhat constructive today. I've been making a PCB for the active tone circuit on my guitar a Westone Rainbow replica but with a little twist. I have a real Westone guitar, the Thunder 1A. I've decided to "make" a version of the Rainbow that doesn't exist. So like my real Westone this will be a 1A version, the "A" stands for Active Tone. My friend made a version of the circuit on strip board but for some reason it isn't working, so I decided to rebuild it on a PCB.

I etched it myself and used the laser printer toner transfer method where you print the circuit outline on a piece of magazine paper and use a hot clothes iron to make it bond with the blank copper PCB material. You then use warm water to dissolve the paper leaving you with a masked off region that resembles the circuit you want.

Then you put it into an acid bath and this dissolves the exposed copper leaving you with the circuit traces. Then you drill holes to pass the components through and solder them in place. It took a couple of attempts to get a board I could etch but it's working out pretty good so far!

This is what the original factory PCB looks like...

This is mine so far...

Not super neat yet but once it's done I will tidy it up and reinforce the traces with a layer of solder. I had to fudge together a 2M2 resistor because I didn't have any in stock.

 

[maycontainthunder]

I've done quite a bit of PCB work but not tried making my own. Props to you for achieving this!

Too much solder can cause issues and so can too little. Some of the joints in the top pic look like the solder hasn't 'taken' to the wire of the resistor. This is where it gets annoying, one tiny bit of dirt and it won't stick!

Be careful adding too much heat to the tracks, you can burn the board and the tracks fall off.

 

[MildredHubble]

I've done quite a bit of PCB work but not tried making my own. Props to you for achieving this!

Too much solder can cause issues and so can too little. Some of the joints in the top pic look like the solder hasn't 'taken' to the wire of the resistor. This is where it gets annoying, one tiny bit of dirt and it won't stick!

Be careful adding too much heat to the tracks, you can burn the board and the tracks fall off.

Its a bit unusual having no "through hole plating" so the solder isn't quite traveling the way I'm used to, but I usually get everything tacked into place then go round and "dress" (as I call it) each joint to deal with any cold joints. That but doesn't tend to take too long on proper PCBs but it's probably going to take a little longer on this.

I'm trying not to allow the solder to block up any of the holes too I need to go and dig out some capacitors from my parts organiser. I think I probably have all but the tantalum ones so I will have to borrow them from the other board my friend made.

Hopefully when everything is soldered I will have the final piece of my guitar and I can get to playing it!

 

[maycontainthunder]

Look forward to seeing it working! This is always the nerve wracking part when you collect everything up and it doesn't catch fire... will it work? Will you get an exploding capacitor symphony or the right sound?

 

[Stuttermabolur]

That seems like a lot of work! Nice job!

By the way, erm, in case there are people here who don't know, what is PCB?

 

[maycontainthunder]

By the way, erm, in case there are people here who don't know, what is PCB?

Printed Circuit Board.

 

[MildredHubble]

That seems like a lot of work! Nice job!

By the way, erm, in case there are people here who don't know, what is PCB?

Oh dear! Yes I should have qualified that! I intended to actually, it just slipped my mind. I will edit my post to clarify

 

[Judge]

Making our own printed circuit board was the first project assignment I had in high school electronics. Though as I recall, it wasn't nearly as elaborate.

 

[MildredHubble]

Making our own printed circuit board was the first project assignment I had in high school electronics. Though as I recall, it wasn't nearly as elaborate.

I've etched a PCB once before, but I ended up making several errors that made it a bit of a waste of time so from that point on I just used matrix board as I can't stand Vero or strip board. It makes debugging a pain unless you've spaced things out a lot, which doesn't make for the smallest of circuit boards. At least with matrix board, if you have carefully laid down the connections you can see if something has come loose.

The great thing about PCBs is if the circuit works then you can just reuse the stencil/template and you are almost guaranteed to have a working board assuming you put the components in the right place.

I've been carefully going through my stock of capacitors though and I appear to be lacking a few I need so I may have to order some. I could take them off the other board of course but I feel a bit bad about doing that when my friend worked so hard on it. On the other hand I suppose it's not the end of the world if I have a working board like he intended. I'm going to mull it over for a bit I think

 

[MildredHubble]

Little update I need to find two more components! One tantalum cap and one 4n7 cap! I don't have them :-( But I suppose they won't take long to arrive. Maybe my dad will let me order via his Amazon Prime account and I can get them in a day or so! But everything is in the right place as far as I can tell and I've checked that the joints are good and added a bit of solder for a bit of strength on the traces

 

[Lysholm]

Wow! That's a lot of work. Hats off to you, dude - but I'll take a turret board any day.

 

[MildredHubble]

Wow! That's a lot of work. Hats off to you, dude - but I'll take a turret board any day.

I'd not heard of turret board before, but I had heard of peg board, or at least I've heard it referred to as this. There seems to be a point of equilibrium where making a PCB is ultimately more trouble when you do it by hand or the DIY way.

You have to contend with the unpredictable nature of transferring the stencil and drilling holes and then picking and placing the components. Usually if the board is complex it just seems better to me to solder wires to matrix board as it probably works out a little quicker than all the steps involved in making a PCB.

But if you know your schematic is good and you have it in kicad or EagleCad you can just route the board and send it off to PCBway and get a nice easy board to solder. Of course that costs a bit but probably not much more than the materials you need for doing it at home.

One thing I'm noticing is that the through hole plating helps the solder flow more uniformly on professional PCBs. It's not all that problematic not having it but it definitely helps get a more solid connection. Everything is nice and solid though, so it appears my second ever attempt at a PCB has been successful so far. Just a shame I'm missing two components as I would have been testing it by now!

 

[330]

Amazing ! I always wanted to do this as well . Just nervous I will burn the pc board

 

[MildredHubble]

Amazing ! I always wanted to do this as well . Just nervous I will burn the pc board

It's actually not that difficult once you have an idea of how the etchant behaves. It's poisonous stuff though so you have to be careful you don't get any in your mouth lol! I have a habit of touching my face unconsciously so I have to make sure I don't transfer any that way. Definitely an active process!

You can make a fairly safe etchant with salt and another chemical I cant remember off the top of my head, I want to say white vinegar but it's probably something else. The only issue is that the etchant will contain ferric chloride which is nasty stuff but very deep blue!

 

[MildredHubble]

It was Hydrogen Peroxide, Salt and Vinegar! I was partly right lol!