The way things used to be.

[SeanB]

Was looking through some old files, and found these oldies, a reminder of the first PCB set I made. Done with home etched boards, and toner transfer, using an electric clothes iron to do the transfer from the overhead transparency sheet to the PCB material. Still got the PCB drill I used, along with the loads of tiny fragile drill bits that you used to make the holes, and hoping you would not break all those fragile drill bits before you ran out of bits, with holes still left to do.

Pre CAD, and I did the originals on graph paper, reversed so the lines were faintly visible, but would not copy through, and then with some permanent marker pens to do corrections.

[soldar]

if it was a one-off I often drew it directly by hand with a water-resistant marker pen; if I expected to do more than one I most often used the UV photo-sensitive system.

What a pain!

[tggzzz]

Was looking through some old files, and found these oldies, a reminder of the first PCB set I made. Done with home etched boards, and toner transfer, using an electric clothes iron to do the transfer from the overhead transparency sheet to the PCB material. Still got the PCB drill I used, along with the loads of tiny fragile drill bits that you used to make the holes, and hoping you would not break all those fragile drill bits before you ran out of bits, with holes still left to do.

Pre CAD, and I did the originals on graph paper, reversed so the lines were faintly visible, but would not copy through, and then with some permanent marker pens to do corrections.

For older techniques I used, see https://entertaininghacks.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/a-40-year-old-hack-disinterred/

Professionals used rubylith red and blue tape. https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/rubylith

[Brumby]

Dalo pen.

Ugly, but it worked.

[Berni]

I was doing the UV process instead because i didn't have a laser printer.

Sure don't miss those days. The mess from all the chemicals and that irritating FR4 dust from drilling. Even used ferric chloride at first.

[Brumby]

In my day, ferric chloride was the only etchant I knew.

[rdl]

I made these boards when I first got interested in electronics using rub-on transfers from Radio Shack and ferric chloride to etch. I mostly just wanted to see how hard it was. It was very time consuming to lay down the traces, so I didn't make too many more after these. I powered them up not too many years ago and they still worked.

[SeanB]

Got to dig up the timer i did to handle phone calls, as you really needed to be careful on phone calls in the old days when trunk calls were expensive. I soldered the batteries in, and when i last pressed power a year or three ago it still worked, and the batteries had not leaked either.

[tggzzz]

Dalo pen.

Ugly, but it worked.

No, the effing things didn't, for.me.at least.

Hence my inventing techniques that did work and could be used for DIL ics.