Laminators vs Press’n’Peel for beginners

[ryanmills]

I spent some time searching thru posts about using laminators for the toner transfer method with really conflicting results. I did see some people talking about Press’n’Peel. Both look to take some practice to get a solid transfer. Is one really easier over the other? I leaning towards trying the Pulsar Toner Transfer Paper first.

[KL27x]

I use a lot of transfer paper. As far as I ever got sourcing the stuff, the PnP is significantly cheaper than Pulsar when you buy 100 sheets at a time, which I have done multiple times. That said, I use only Pulsar, ever since I tried it. 1.50 per ~90 square inches of transfer paper is certainly cheap enough. My own time and labor dwarfs this cost. Pulsar works great. I use a laminator (and a heat gun), and I have never messed up a single board since I started using the Pulsar 2 or 3 years ago. I still have a small stack of PnP, which I'm too cheap to throw away. But unless Pulsar goes out of business and there's no replacement, I am not cheap enough to ever use it up. Redoing a board... that is a huge waste of time on a double-sided board.

Some pointers. These are the bare minimum steps I have discovered to get perfect result every time without wasting time/effort redoing anything:
1. Wet board and scrub with steel wool and dish soap
2. Rinse off the soap (else you will turn your etchant into a bubble batch)
3. Dip in etchant to texturize the surface
4. Examine for streaks/fingerprints. The entire surface should turn dark. If light patches remain where it looks unetched, redo from step 1.
5. Rinse in big old bucket of dirty water, it's ok.
6. let board dry, naturally, or shoot it with heat gun until dry. If you let it dry, naturally, you will observe green/white streaks all over the board when it dries, but you can ignore this.
7. Preheat with heat gun and/or run thru laminator, once.
8. Transfer
9. If board doesn't exit the back of the laminator so hot you can't hold it between your fingers, run it again while shooting the board with heat gun until this is so. This varies depending on how big the board is and what thickness pour.
9.b For a doublesided board, align your other side and repeat steps 8 and 9.
10. Drop board into your big ole bucket of dirty water, and peel off the paper 10 seconds later.
11. Board is 100% perfect. Nothing more, nothing less. But if any toner bleedthrough is visible on the Pulsar paper, you can back off the heat a bit, next time. There is actually a relatively huge margin for error, when you use the Pulsar and the pre etch. This is just how I calibrate my fingertips for step 9. If there is no bleedthrough, you can afford more heat. If there is bleedthrough, you are on the high end.
12. After etch, scrub the wet board with steel wool to remove the toner and shine the preetched layer off the copper, and rinse it off.
13. Rub board with liquid rosin flux and set it aside to dry.
14. Trim and/or drill holes.

[KL27x]

Iron on a cork mat. Cool. Maybe I'll try that.

The board should already be so hot you cannot pick it up with your fingers.

It is this handling of a hot board that puts me off using a laminator.

I suppose it depends on the toner composition and the laminator, to some degree. I actually don't preheat the board that hot. I don't want it hot enough to make the toner stick on contact. It's cool enough to reposition. But I do the extra second pass with the heat gun, pretty much by default. When it starts rolling out the back, I want it to be so hot I can't quite hold it pinched between my fingers for more than about 1 second before I have to let go. But I have no discomfort handling it by the edges. From there it just gets dropped in a bucket of water, anyhow. The laminator means you have to get the board super hot just in one area at a time, which is where I primarily shoot it, where it's going into the laminator (plastic cover removed and laminator mounted to a small wood board). I do all of this outside, next to my etch tank. I would not be allowed to keep any of this toner transfer gear in my own kitchen near my oven, haha.

[tautech]

Everyone that successfully does TT has their own recipe, you have to find what works for you.
I've never used PnP or Pulsar, only papers of some kind, formally the waxy backings from self adhesive labels but a move from 600 dpi to 1200 dpi printer to address trace and infill porosity has me leaning a new recipe that'll give good results. (different toner and twice as much needs a different approach)

I've used a laminator from day 1, one that uses a thin and tough cardboard carrier pouch in which you place the subject between the 2 layers.
2 passes, no preheat.

[ryanmills]

Thanks everyone, I think I will try the Pulsar first and see what I get.

[james_s]

I use a laminator with the Press n Peel film, at least I think that's the stuff, it's a blue plastic film. For a while I was using magazine paper but I found that was inconsistent. Some types of ink would fill in the pores and make a very nice etch while others resulted in pitting. I could often see the image or text that had been printed in the magazine etched into the copper. That in itself could have uses but it wasn't what I was going for.

[KL27x]

IME, the PnP Blue can work just brilliantly. But... it definitely requires more heat to get a successful transfer. As is, I can get delamination bubbles on my super thin pcb stock. (I made PCB as thin as 0.007" thick... probably more often than any other, actually, since I can't order pcb this thin without going flex). This higher heat requirement results in a smaller margin of error. I've done probably over 400 boards with PnP Blue. I never got to the point where I was 100% confident in the outcome. When I switched to Pulsar, I continued to cringe at the "moment of truth," as I had become accustomed with the PnP. But the failure never came. I became more bold. Using less heat. It took dozens of boards, but the anxiety disappeared. I peel the paper, verify it is all white, and move on. I don't even examine the actual board before etch. The drama is completely gone. The closest to a failure I have gotten is the border defining outline perhaps not transferring where I put it too close to the edge of the board. This is where I stopped flirting with less heat.

Also, with my particular toner and etchant, the blue plastic layer is not necessary. Pulsar sells an "over layer" of green plastic film, which you can add after the initial transfer. I have bought it. It's a PITA. And again, for my my process, it is totally unnecessary. I get essentially no pitting in ground pours. Maybe a couple of bitty dots over 4 square inches. FWIW, I use cupric in a bubble tank and an HP Laserjet. For the final nail in the coffin, the Pulsar handles like thick paper or like very thin cardstock. Very easy to handle, trim, etc. The curly, staticy plastic PnP is a bit of a pain.