The finished board. It looks quite good! The new board etching station at BDO seems to be a roaring success! I am excited to begin using it so that I can make one-off boards with out so much fuss or expense. 

One of the best ways to spot trouble spots was to look at the press-n-peel. Dark toner appears wherever there was a boo-boo.

We ironed and peeled. 

Next the pre-cut board is carefully placed between the two press-n-peel sheets.

Next we tried a two sided board. Here Mike demonstrates his alignment technique. He tapes one press-n-peel side to a perfboard and the aligns and tapes to other side against a light source.

We then threw the board into the warm ferric chloride and agitated. We check up on it using the white precision board manipulator about every two minutes. Once we saw raw fiber board exposed we started checking about once a minute.

On our first go around you can see we missed a fair number of traces. Nothing too serious though. All of it could be corrected with a Sharpie. 

For about 2 1/2 minutes Mike applied pressure from the iron on the board. 

Mike carefully places the press-n-peel on the copper board which rest on a sort of industrial paper towel which in turn rests on what appears to be plywood with an MDF surface. 

Here we see a close up of the press-n-peel. You can see that the lines are pretty fine. 

The main attraction of the day was, of course, the PCB board etching demo that Mike and Tom put on for us. In the left you can see the dremel drill press that we used to drill out the holes once we'd etched a board. The blue object is the press-n-peel print out. Right above that you can see some copper clad boards, a coke bottle with Ferric Chloride etchant and a precision white board manipulator. Further to the right, the larger grey box is an agitator. When switched on the top portion would rock back and forth gently. Sitting on the agitated surface is a hot plate and on top of that a plastic tray with some ferric chloride in it.
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Tom donated a slew of SMD parts to the club. Since I am starting a library of SMD parts as a part of my transition from point-to-point perfboards to etched board he gave them to me to keep. There are green and red LEDs, diodes and some three pin device that might be a transistor. I'll try to get them cataloged soon. There are probably 500 to a 1000 of each.
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I arrived in fine style with my rolling 2 story tool box. I think that little sucker is going to work out! I had two bots a soldering iron and more inside. That coupled with my component carrier that you can just see behind the toolbox makes for a mighty portable little bot station.
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An O-scope made an appearance at BDO this time. No-one quite got around to giving it a try though.
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Mike had his Therimin bot out and about again. He has two plates in front this time instead of the old antennae. However the sensitivity only seemed a touch better.
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Maddie and Don teach Tom his resistor colors.
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Well it was BDO time again. I was a bit late this time. Um, unavoidably detained, let's say. Nevertheless, BDO was good fun as always. Here we see some BDO regulars ponder matters 'bot.
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