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Saturday, April 03, 2010

Hot copper and PLA

Acting on a suggestion from Vik, I have found that PLA can be extruded onto copper clad board and, if it is hot enough, it sticks very well. I have to flex the board to remove it. 55°C is too cold but 130°C works well. I haven't tried anything in between yet.

Assuming PLA will resist PCB etchant, this could be a way of making PCB's without a laser printer, albeit quite low resolution. With 0.3mm filament squashed to 0.24mm a single line would be 0.36mm wide, which is 14 thou.

It also seems like a good bed material for making PLA objects on.



More details here: hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2010/04/cu-pla
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2 comments:

  1. RoboteernatApril 03, 2010 11:41 AM

    im actually using a FR4 copper board on my Makerbot as a surface for heated build base, the temp needs to be higher, but it works very well. I have a bubble etch tank, will try this later! ive also tried putting a dremil onto it to see if it could mill a pcb - results good, tho a bit curvey!

    roboteernat.blogspot.com

    Nat

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  2. The EditorApril 03, 2010 7:07 PM

    Cool.
    I´m at Easterhegg, we have a RepMan,
    the heated copper-board from my own
    RepMan (tMax currently 65°C but we can "overclock" that up to 200% to get higher)
    and a lot of PLA from the Makerbot on the next table.

    I hope we can do a test-series tomorrow.

    Marcus

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