🚀 go-pugleaf

>In article <1993Jan5.162702.18205@organpipe.uug.arizona.edu> dlatimer@iris4.ch
e
>m.arizona.edu (Darin Latimer) writes:
>>Is it possible to do your own through hole plating?  I have seen the
>>press in rivet type vias but was warned away from them as they tend to 
>>form flaky connections.  How is the through hole processing completed at a 
>>board house? ...
>
>They drill the holes, prepare the surfaces carefully, plate a very thin
>layer of copper on chemically, and then thicken it with an electroplating
>process.  That's a one-sentence summary of a complex and tricky process.
>It is not practical as a do-it-yourself exercise, not if you want reliable
>results.  Getting it to work dependably requires precise control of things
>like temperature and solution chemistry, which means spending several
>kilodollars on professional-grade equipment.
>-- 
>"God willing... we shall return."       | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
>       -Gene Cernan, the Moon, Dec 1972 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry

Add to that that even the profesionals goof up plated thru holes occasionally,
it really isn't anything a home experimenter wants to try to mess with.

I remember almost 10 years ago when the company I work for had to scrap a
whole batch of ASSEMBLED circuit boards because the plated thru hole's
barrels were intermitently seperating from internal traces (these were 8
layer boards). That PC vender was removed from the approved supplier list
and investigated to determine the cause (it turned out to be that they wern't
changing their drill bits frequently enough and the dull bits were making
bad holes that wouldn't hold the plating reliably).

                                        R. Tim Coslet

Usenet: R_Tim_Coslet@cup.portal.com
        technology, n.  domesticated natural phenomena