Now you have you printout ready and your board trimmed to size and cleaned up it’s time to work the toner transfer magic.
You’ll need a highly specialized tool for this part.
Set it to as hot as possible, but without steam. You should be fine with using your normal iron (assuming you own one) as the magazine paper is pretty clean. You can also be extra careful by using an additional layer of clean paper between the iron and the magazine paper.
You’ll also need a short length of wooden dowl (15cm x 1cm dia) and a wooden board to work on.
Carefully match up your printout (trimmed a bit) to your
copper board, a heavy border on the print out helps a lot here.
Briefly apply some heat to the board/printout pair to tack the two together.
Now place the board/printout on top of the dowel and iron it hard!
Using the dowel helps to focus the pressure you apply whilst ironing onto a smaller surface area. Roll the iron backwards and forwards to cover the complete area of the board. Make sure you go over the whole board right up to the edges and also rotate the board from time to time to to even out the ironing direction. 5 minutes of this should be enough to do the job. The dowel is a really cool trick it makes all the difference. I don’t claim to have invented this idea, it’s been floating around on various groups for a while.
There is a possibility of over ironing and squashing out the traces into on splodgy mess, but I think you’d have to be pretty insane to reach those sorts of pressures and temperatures. Experience is the key I guess.
I like to finish up with a quick ironing session round the edges of the board just to be sure that the paper is well and truly attached at the edges as this seems to help.
Now on to the next stage : Soaking and cleaning.
Catmacey's stuff 