What speed did you use for vector cut using this method and what mA did you set the laser to?

@@dholi2k I found that slow and low power works very well. It seems that it takes a significant amount of time for the laser to come up to full strength. We set out laser using percent power and speed. I found about 3% power and 5% speed gave excellent results. The laser now has a new tube so I will likely need to come up with new settings.

@@joed222 Thanks Joe. I've still to test on Transparency sheet, but tried on soaked paper using my K40 at 20mm/s but lines aren't straight. Will need to slow it down further I think.

@@dholi2k I do my work at Gainesville Hackerspace. We have a K40 and a VLS3.50. I cut the stencils on the VLS.

0.5mm pitch is very challenging. Great results. Thanks for sharing.

I tried it, didn't really work in my machine :)

Nice to know! So i won't bother trying it myself, since i've got pretty much the same one as you do

yeah, they are for laser printers :)

Thanks. I tried different speeds and power on the bear film first. I didn't try with tape, but a few layers of dry paper, it helped but wasn't good. paper with water on one side was pretty good, but both sides worked a lot better. :)

yes, but I realized all the outlets were in use, when I were about to turn it on :)

Thanks :)

Yeah in theory. I used about 7w of power and less could probably do if you go slower. The catch is, that it has to be a far infrared laser (the co2 is 10 um), else it will just shine straight through the film :)

Thanks!

I haven't tried it on our K40,

I don't have the boards yet :P Thanks

Ok, looking forward to next video, missed the bit about no raised edges :)

It is a 40 tube :) Thanks for watching!

i used only 20% power,and the Chinese specification of 40W is probably optimistic anyway :) I am pretty sure 5-10 W would be enough. Just be careful if it is a diode laser and not a CO2 tube, visible light lasers at that power are very dangerous to the eyes :)

and invisible also, I mean light that could enter the eye

The tape I have is too thin, so it won't leave enough paste. :)

I've used 0.003" tape (~0.075 mm) with no issues and very good results, however any one with thinkness of 0.075-0.15 will do (I prefer 0.075 or 0.1 mm ones as it puts out just right amount of solder paste). It's not very expensive either (considering that you probably won't be using that much of it anyway). Just make sure you buy one without adhesive :) I use reflow oven (infamous Chinese T-962 with slight modifications) and work with a lot of very fine-pitch parts, any attempts to put on paste by hand ended up with a ton of bridges (some of which were under the chip so I had to rework it manually using hot air gun), so I gave up and now always use stencils.

I use 0.1mm kapton foil. Works fine.

Let me guess: One of your T-962 mods was to take all that stinky white adhesive tape off the insulation and replace it with kapton tape :)

@Chip Guy Vids Yea, I've put a crap ton of kapton tape just to make sure :) I've also reflashed MCU with community firmware, added MOSFET for fan control (so it's not that annoying anymore), and added cold junction sensor. Still I think buying that oven was the best ~$200 spent as it made assembling boards sooo much easier! Now I use 0402 passives everywhere I can 'cause they cost next to nothing ($10 for the full reel of 10000, which will be last for years for me) and help make my boards more compact. Hand soldering them would be a massive pain.

I tried this once and failed. 40W is not enough and the only thing that really works is to engrave something into the solder mask or removing it. Or laser engrave something into a silk screen rectangle. The 10µm 40W laser can not cut the copper, it's too reflective. Cutting the PCB is theoretically possible but a stinky firey process that leaves black burned awful looking edges.

Check out his channel, he built a laser engraver specifically for this purpose

I need to make a few boards, so I want a stencil for applying solder paste, instead of soldering each component by hand :)

Thank you!