Life is so much easier now, dirtypcb is a great service, I have a pile of boards here from them which are far greater quality than anything I could hope to produce at home or even in the lab I used to have. They're also better quality than any of the local board houses I used in the past.
Having said that, I did hand manufacture fifty single sided boards from photo laminate to completed product in one weekend using a Dremel drill press for somewhere around four thousand holes and hand soldering every component so it was definitely possible On 23 Jun 2016 00:01, "Nick Sayer via time-nuts" <time-nuts@febo.com> wrote: > > > On Jun 22, 2016, at 1:33 PM, Mark Sims <hol...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > > > The value, quality, and turn-around from all these places is amazing. > In the olden days, one was paying $50 a square inch for a single prototype > board with 4 week turn-around. > > > > Not to turn this into the “Four Yorkshireman” sketch, but in the olden > days (which by my reckoning were maybe only 10 years ago) there wasn’t > reasonable hobbyist access to PCB CAD software either - like EAGLE or > Altium or KiCad or the like. > > When I was a teenager (mid 80s) I tried making my own PCB with clad board, > an etch resist pen, that nasty brown acid and the smallest drill bit I > could get my hands on. This was a single-sided board - I had absolutely no > way to line up a two-sided design even if through-hole plating would have > been an option (of course, it wouldn’t have). No solder resist, no silk > screen. > > It was a disaster. Even with a drill press I couldn’t line the DIP holes > up closely enough to mash a chip in without bending the leads to hell and > gone. > > It was that - and seeing the arrival of surface mount - that convinced me > at the time that there was no future for hobbyist electronic design and > creation. I dove with both feet into a career in software engineering. > > I had no clue that all I had to do was wait 20 years. > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to > https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. > _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.