If I include my first 3 tanks, add another pile of plexiglass to my expenditures. Plus an Igloo cooler, lol. And not one but 2 fish tank bubblers I tried before going to compressed air. I made some mistakes in the first two tries of making a plexiglass tank, trying to do solvent welding. The guys that make 200 gallon fish tanks are evidently much better at it than I am. I couldn't hold a liter of acid for more than a month before springing a leak.
25 sheets of Press n Peel lasted me almost 7 years. I cut up pieces that are only as big as I need, a full sheet is good for dozens of small boards.
Yeah, I cut them up, too. That's how much PCB I have made. In fact, I think I shorted a 100 pack of PnP in my estimate. But it's hard to remember. I have had some unique needs, in the past. I switched to Pulsar from the moment I tried it. I keep some pre-cut 3x4" pieces taped to printer paper in a 3 ring folder, ready to feed into the printer. But I've done boards up to 5.5 x 8.5".
Admittedly, I tried to make toner transfer work for some apps where I really shouldn't have. And I caused myself more problems than I solved. But I was making toner transfer PCB before I even know how to make a Gerber. I used a lot of paper and made a lot of boards that I had designed in paint or in ExpressPCB. Particularly early on when I still had some gremlins, I had some misguided efforts. When you go from one perfect sample to making a half a dozen panels at a time, you find out how reliable your process really is. But I've had plenty more apps where toner transfer is perfect, and gremlins are no more.
Isn't there an issue with bridging here? Professional boards have solder mask that repel the solder and allow you to do drag soldering.
EZ solder mask with just a sharpie:[Imgur](
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The black isn't sharpie. It's oxidized copper. Using a sharpie, you can color in the pads then oxidize the rest of the board. Then the solder won't wick out of the pad area. It holds up to a few careful reworks, maybe, but it eventually dissolves with enough flux and heat. This is a huge SO chip. Drag soldered. But I've done quite a lot of SSOP. I've done down to MSOP and QFN, too. I consider any trace down to 8 mil to be no special care. One shot one kill. One of the boards I made needed all 8 mil traces. Albeit, it was (very!) small, but I made a 4x6" panel of it with zero defects. That one was just a plug-in daughter board for a couple of small EEPROMS, but to keep it completely single-sided took some tight routing. The board in the linked pic is mostly 12/12 or thereabouts from very early in my learning curve.
It's really so so very easy to get 100% perfect, consistent results every single time. There is just no way UV is better or easier down to 8 mil, if you use the right tools and strategy with toner transfer. Honestly, if you go by what tutorials are available, today? It is going to waste a lot of your time. The info today is actually worse than it was 10 years ago. The websites I learned from 10 years ago are all gone. And to sort through the pile of crap videos out there and somehow figure out what is good and what is bad, there's no way to know. And it will waste a lot of time.
UV is probably the best way to go if you want good results right away. And if you want a more professional quality soldermask.