PCB Etching Kit in Australia.

[Hammer_651]

Hi all. Hammer here. Does anyone know where in Australia I can buy a hobbyist PCB etching kit from please. I have tried all the usual suppliers but to no avail. I would like to learn to do tis for smaller PCB or replacement ones.
Thanks.
H.

[Bryn]

Do you have to get it from your home country though? If that's the case, try Jaycar Electronics, and there's plenty of them all around New South Wales (yes, I had a quick peek at your profile to know what region you were from).

Hope this helps

[indeterminate]

https://www.jaycar.com.au/pcb-etching-kit/p/HG9990

you will be much better off learning to use KiCad and sending off your designs to a pcb house for manufacture.

[Benta]

Do you really want to do this?
You'll be down several 100 $ before you have something functional:
Film printer (many laser printers can do the job).
Photoresist solution (lacquer and developer plus dust-free environment).
Vertical etching tub with heater and air pump for bubbling/circulation.
Getting rid of the chemicals afterwards.
Etc.

I used to do it, but now send it out of house to a manufacturer. It's so cheap nowadays, that the all DIY bother doesn't make sense.
Only downside is I have to wait for the package containing the PCBs.

[Solder_Junkie]

As others mentioned, do you really want to mess around etching and drilling your own boards? I have done that for years and finally, in the past couple of years, switched to having the Chinese make boards for me. Not only is there zero mess, the boards are far better than I could ever hope to make at home. The only downside is the occasional error, which for home etched boards can be re-done in a matter of minutes, whereas you have to wait a couple of weeks for the new boards from China.

The cost is very low provided you opt for basic colour boards, take a look at JLCPCB. Boards are only made in sets of 5 the same, but for such a low cost you have 4 spare boards!

Personally, I prefer Sprint Layout to KiCad, as it suits my method of working better.

If you are making boards for surface mount parts, you need to be aware that pad sizes for commercial manufacture tend to be smaller than you would use for hand soldering, ie they don't always have the extra 0.5mm to 1mm needed to hand solder. Check your actual part with a caliper against the pad on the PCB software/manufacturers data sheet.

If you really must etch your own, there are A4 size heat transfer papers for PCB making on eBay for little cost, these are yellow sheets that have a shiny side, you print a mirror image with a laser printer on the shiny side, cut out the layout and iron it onto ordinary plain copper board, it works pretty well. Use ferric chloride to etch in a tall thin container, such as a "toilet duck" bottle with the top cut off, or similar narrow plastic bottle. You will have to source FeCl locally as shipping will be difficult.

Typical transfer paper supplier is this item on eBay.com 254238691075

Sprint Layout: https://www.electronic-software-shop.com/lng/en/electronic-software/sprint-layout-60.html

KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/

JLCPCB: https://jlcpcb.com/

A very useful video on hand soldering SMD parts is this one: https://youtu.be/eZtPR8_x0nc?feature=shared

SJ

[forrestc]

Does anyone know where in Australia I can buy a hobbyist PCB etching kit from please. I have tried all the usual suppliers but to no avail. I would like to learn to do tis for smaller PCB or replacement ones.

I'm going to repeat what everyone else has said:  Do you really want to bother?  I'll explain why below.

Back in the day (like 35 years ago), I used to use ferric chloride you could buy at the local radio shack (in the US).  You could buy bare copper clad circuit boards.  To do the resist you'd either use rub on trace transfers or in some cases I'd just draw my traces with a sharpie.

When laser printers became readily available, I graduated to using circuit board design software and printing the design on an overhead transparency (i.e., clear plastic).  I'd then use that transparency to expose a photosensitive circuit board.  You'd then need a developer to clean the excess resist off before etching.  About this time I switched to Ammonium Persulfate as my etchant as Ferric Chloride likes to stain when spilled.   

I never ended up with a fancy etchant tank - it was always a plastic tray that I'd manually slosh the etchant around.  After that was done etching, You'd then have to drill all the holes - maybe this isn't as big of a deal anymore with surface mount, but that was a time consumer since everything was through hole components.

I quit before figuring out toner transfer - apparently that works fairly well as it basically uses an iron to transfer toner to the board.  You still need bare copper clad, but then you're ironing your design onto the board, and using the toner itself for the etch resist. 

So why did I quit?  Quite frankly, all of the above is a big PITA.  30 years ago you didn't have much of a choice.  Today, you download KiCad (free).  Do your design (time), and then send it off to a fab.    The cost for 5 boards delivered isn't much more than the cost of bare copper boards, and when you factor in the cost of etchant and everything else, you're going to find that it's just simpler and easier and most likely cheaper to get the boards professionally done.

Now, if you're looking to do it so you can say you've etched your own boards for some reason, that might be a different thing.   Personally, if I wanted to make my own boards I'd probably look at doing the "cnc router" method since I suspect it would be about the same cost to build one of the mini CNC kits ($100-150ish) as it would be to get everything you need to do old school etching.  I believe those do the holes as well if you need through holes.