| General > General Technical Chat |
| The reason why most PCB soldermasks are colored green. |
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| retiredfeline:
Maybe it's because bare fibreglass boards are greenish so using green soldermask kept the look familiar? I remember exposing and etching double sided fibreglass back in the day. |
| Someone:
--- Quote from: BrianHG on May 21, 2022, 04:01:21 am --- --- Quote from: Someone on May 18, 2022, 08:15:26 am --- --- Quote from: BrianHG on May 18, 2022, 06:47:08 am ---From what I have seen, the default green solder mask is the finest around the SMD pads and easiest to hand solder. Boards I have purchased with white and black solder mask were crap by comparison as they seemed too thick, especially vertically. --- End quote --- I have seen crap quality examples in every color, and equally excellent white or black masks. Experience/care from the manufacturer probably makes up a big part of it. --- End quote --- I don't think it's that. The white and black are designed to be completely opaque hiding everything underneath, meaning you need a degree of thickness. For the green, it is not optimized to be opaque like a layer of paint, so it can be formulated at thin as possible, giving us a semi-transparent appearance, so long as it will not flake away. --- End quote --- Pigment load is almost orthogonal to color, you're trying to join things which are correlated in practice but not causative. Are there fine/thin masks in white and black? yep I've had them on boards were they heavily pigmented and opaque? yep, even down to 20 microns thickness in white! Have I also seen "watery" semi-transparent solder masks? again, yes, in all different colours and finishes If you have a closer relationship with the manufacturer you can ask for all sorts of things. |
| David Hess:
--- Quote from: retiredfeline on May 21, 2022, 04:44:38 am ---Maybe it's because bare fibreglass boards are greenish so using green soldermask kept the look familiar? I remember exposing and etching double sided fibreglass back in the day. --- End quote --- That is what I have always assumed. Some FR4 or G10 was very green and not just greenish. |
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