Milling PCBs...

1357913579 Death Cog Machine
edited April 2011 in Life
It works. Very well.

Here is what a 20+ year old milling machine can do, with 3rd party software. It was originally designed to be a hobby/educational milling machine, for milling balsa wood into model cars/co2 cartridge powered cars.

dsc00046vv.jpg

dsc00049yj.jpg

dsc00050gde.jpg

It also drilled all 369 holes for me. PCB was done with a 45 degree general engraving bit. I zero'd the Z axis by hand knobs on the motors, moving down until the bit just barely started to scratch some duct tape I had holding the copper clad board down, the traces turned out just as big if not smaller than my shitty acid-etch attempt.

Plus internets to whoever can guess the mill manufacturer/model. It is upwards of 20 years old, and 20 years ago it was $10,000.

The software I used is Galaad, definitely recommend it. Has everything needed to control these old machines with built-in preprocessors and memory limits (toolpaths are loaded one at a time to deal with the memory limitations on this machine). It also has a PCB design/mill feature.

Comments

Sign In or Register to comment.