Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Toner Transfer
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Doctorandus_P:
What does such an HP cartridge cost, and how many PCB's do you make in 5 years?
And how many of those PCB's are wider than 8cm?
What is the average price of "toner cartrige wear" for the amount of PCB's you print?

Just write it off as expenses, and use the rest of the toner cardridge for less critical printing where ghosting is acceptable.

Alternatively there are loads of alternatives.
Marco Reps made some nice youtube vids about directly lighting UV film with a laser.
Alternatively you can write directly on copper with an etch resistant pen, or write with a pen on UV film and develop that.

All those methods would require an investmet of a few hunddred EUR / USD / Pesetas /Lires / Whatever, but it is easily doable if you're a bit proficient in mechanics, or you can choose from a multitude of CNC kits from Ali / Ebay / China / Etc.

Watch some Marco Reps vid's. He does fun stuff with electronics, and instead of some soap series you might learn something usefull from him.


tautech:

--- Quote from: Doctorandus_P on January 20, 2019, 01:29:39 am ---All those methods would require an investment of a few hundred EUR / USD / Pesetas /Lires / Whatever, but it is easily doable if you're a bit proficient in mechanics, or you can choose from a multitude of CNC kits from Ali / Ebay / China / Etc.

--- End quote ---
Actually they don't for the average 'equipped' office as all have laser printers and many have laminators too so your only outlay is for the etching process, the etchant and a bubbler tank.
All it cost me to get into home etching was time and etchant, the rest I learnt or cobbled together with stuff on hand.
mosafet:
Find a used HP1200. The thing is a tank and OEM toner available at the corner store. Mine is 20 years old and only "recently" replaced the original toner cart(!). Worked fine until empty and the new high capacity cart still going after 5 years. I've never once had a misfeed or jam even with the super thin magazine paper we use for toner transfer. I also use it as a regular office printer though I don't print much these days.
james_s:
The holy grail for me would be a printer that can print etch resist directly on copperclad in a single step. Laser, inkjet or some other tech, doesn't really matter to me, well, actually maybe it does, I gave up on inkjet after buying several cartridges in a row that dried up before I had printed 10 pages, I just don't print very often. For a while I remember there were people using modified inkjet printers that showed promising results but the printers supported by the kits I looked at were eventually discontinued.
KL27x:

--- Quote ---What does such an HP cartridge cost, and how many PCB's do you make in 5 years?
--- End quote ---
I dunno. At a guess it I bought a 2 pack of OEM for maybe 45 dollars like 2 or 3 years ago. I replaced the cartridge only once in the last 5 years.. but I dunno when I got this printer. It might have been only 3-4 years since I bought it. Since I use it for printing, too, the pcb-related portion of my use is probably just a small fraction of the total usage.

If it weren't for wanting to do PCB's, I might have bought another Brother after I stuffed my last one.* I had been using Brother laser printers for the previous 4-5 years. I found my particular Brother worked for PCB's if you replaced the toner with generic. But this degraded the print quality fairly quickly, ruining the cartridge or the drum or something.

*I had the Brother and the HP at the same time, for awhile, and I kept a stack of Pulsar ready to go in the HP. But my Brother printer died a year or 3 back when I turned it off while a large (mistaken) print job was spooling. And it never worked again. So on second thought, maybe I wouldn't buy another Brother.


--- Quote ---Actually they don't for the average 'equipped' office as all have laser printers
--- End quote ---
Me, I'm always going to use a laser printer. Loved it since day 1. The laser printer can print pages in order, without having to print in reverse order, so you can start using the first half of your doc before it's done printing. You don't have to wait for the ink to dry, the cartridge never clogs, and w/e the toner costs? Sure. Bend me over. It's part of the cost of modern business.
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