Thread: Custom Professional PCB's > Make 'em or buy 'em?

Toaster .. What is the size and how many sides ....
i can get it done for you at a very nice price here in India ...

Cheers
Mastero

Originally Posted by 2k1Toaster

Can you do component placement and sourcing as well? What is the approximate price per square cm, and price per solder point?

Toaster it works differently here cant give you the price till i know the following

a) Single sided or double
b) How many layers
c) Slikscreen and masking required or not
d) size of the PCB.

Regarding component placement and sourcing yes it can be done.

Cheers
Mastero

Hi guys,
Toner transfer method works fine as long as you follow some thumb rules.
1. make sure the PCB surface is well scrubbed (use steel wool or sand paper) . The roughness helps the toner to stick. But don't scrub hard that you are reasonably reducing the foil thickness. During scrubbing, use detergent (ie liquid dishwashing soap) liberally. This helps remove any kind of oil in the foil surface.
2. Avoid touching the foil surface with your bare hands/fingers. Your natural oil immediately becomes a nuisance to the process. hold the pcb on the sides.
3. Clean the surface with alcohol. A pharmacy grade alcohol ( 70% isopropyl) will do. Again, avoid touching the surface. Put a tissue paper on the top to help prevent this.
4. Iron transfer the image when the iron is ready.
-------Addendum. I ended up with rubbish using Lexmark glossy photo paper. I used the backing sheets of self adhesive labels which yield breath taking (!) results. Note : Just like the photopaper, there is no standard for the backing sheet as to the brand. In fact I am using a locally made labels here in Vietnam. But I read one article that Avery labels are the cheapest alternative to glossy photo paper. - Didn't try though.

Here's another couple of PCB fab houses to add to the list.

E-TekNet is a fairly cost effective proto fab house. Protos start at $24 each for 4 boards, but the price quickly falls as you order any significant quantity:

http://www.e-teknet.com/

Another fab house popular with hobbyists is Advanced Circuits:

http://www.4pcb.com/

They are a little more expensive to deal with, but offer neat services like their FreeDFM service that checks for clearance and fabrication issues before you go to fab. Even if you don't use them as a fab house, you may want to run your gerbers and NC drill files through their FreeDFM service to check out your boards for any issues:

http://www.freedfm.com

Never discount your own time when it comes to building and selling boards. If you have to etch, clean, assemble, program, test, pack, and ship these boards you are building yourself, then you will be spending most all of your time as a one person production line. You may build up the first 10-25 units yourself, but after that you will probably want to order in batches of 100 units from a local, reputable contract electronics manufacturer (CEM). They can handle buying and building the PCB for you, handing you back nice, shiny clean boards. If you provide them with a simple test procedure, they can even program and package the units.

Most of my products are in lower volumes right now, so I typically do 100 piece builds with my CEM. I still do all testing/programming in house, but I have a plan to transfer that to the CEM once my volumes are higher.

Also, make sure you don't price yourself out of moving to a more automated assembly process or to supporting distributors. Make sure you have enough price margin in your product to support growth and to be able to pay yourself. Distributors will want some price breaks so they can be paid for their service, which is promoting and selling your product. Distributors may want anywhere from 25-50% margin. Margin is (sales price - cost of goods)/(sales price). Let's say you found a website that wanted to carry your product with 25% margin and you sell your product for $39.95. Then the cost to them would be $29.96. Make sure what's left out of the $29.96 with your projected volumes is enough to keep the lights on. ;-)

Good luck with it,
Mark Stubbs
http://www.bibaja.com