Like I said earlier, at work, our LPKF machine must have produced a couple of thousand PCBs by now.
good for you. i got none.
Here are my requirements :
100% IDENTICAL boards to what an etched board would look like. so no 'isolation miling only'. i needed full copper rubout.
smallest track : 4 mil .
smallest gap : 4 mils.
Smallest drill : 14mils
standard 62 mils board thickness
plated
board : PCI plug-in card : full height , short form factor ( so roughty 10cm by 14 cm )
milling : (lpkf95S)
the milling bits are V-tipped ( not flat) you set the width of the mill by pressing a plastic ring over the shaft of the milling bit. this controls how deep the bit bites.
if your target material is not perfectly flat , or not mounted perfectly flat ( the pea under the princesses matress problem ) the width fluctuates. the spindle floats on an air bearing and they claim they have precise distance control. they didn't. over a length of 200mm i saw the groove fluctuate from 3 mils to more than 5 mils. i wanted milling of a 4 mil isolation gap. milling is inconsistent.
the same issue happens with the drill bits. i can't remember how many times it broke the drill bit mid cycle. especially their double copper foil material was a disaster.
issues with the machine
- serial port problems. machine locks up milling head down , max rpm
- serial port problems. machine draws a line random through everytinhg on the board rendering entire board garbage. they swapped controllers 3 times. finally blamed the computer.
- serial port problems : during a comms failure while performing a tool change ( our machine had an automatic toolchanger) the machine ran the head into the tool tray bending the entire mechanism...
software lockups during parsing of the gerber.
Plating problems : the chemistry goes bad very quickly end is costly. getting rid of the chemicals is also a nightmare. they refused to give out what the chemicals exactly were so our environmental inspector had problems classifying that stuff.
getting the plating chemistry right was a nightmare. the copper was never shiny , non uniform , air bubbles in the tiny holes... yadda yadda. their board moving mechanism was basically a plastic frame on an eccentric motor. that drive bar broke after 1 hour ...
this was 2003... maybe it's better now. we invested 40k$ in that setup. zero boards ! ZERO !
That stuff is like the hobby 3d printer : you spend more time dicking around with the machine itself than doing work with the machine.
send your boards to china. you can do multilayers, get soldermask and silkscreen , enig and 10% electrically tested. and while waiting for the boards you can do other useful things as opposed to babysitting the crappy mill.