Yusynth (Part 2)

Today I did some more drilling. First I finished the remaining PCB's with the 1 millimeter drill. After that I drilled the mounting holes on the PCB with a 3 millimeter drill. Those holes will eventually be used to fasten the PCB's to the front panels. After I drilled I checked all the PCB's if I didn't forget any holes, and I found some. After that my ex-colleague Marcel checked my work as well and found even more :) There are so many holes it is easy to overlook one or two. Luckily Marcel is very experienced in this work and sees this right away.

After that I cut the PCB's to the right size. In the picture on the right you see the big cutting tool I used for that. Normally it is used to cut metal plates, but works very well on epoxy of the PCB's as well. It is quite a precise job. The size of the PCB's doesn't matter too much off course, but I like to have it nice and tidy for the pictures ;) On some PCB's Yves (the designer) drew lines to cut by, very convenient. I wish everybody would do that. That would makes life a lot easier.

In the picture on the left you see the result. A nice track of PCB's. But it was not finished after that yet. On top of the copper tracks of the PCB is still the layer of photo sensitive material that was not lighted. It has to be washed off, because this way you can't solder them. We used thinner to clean them. We did this outside because of the fumes and off course it is quite flammable and I don't want to set my old company on fire :) As you can see it is quite a nice stack of PCB's. And this is even only half of the end result. Soon we will do another run of PCB's.

The last thing we did was to spray a layer of PCB spray on the PCB's to finish them of. This prevents the copper from corroding and will make the soldering easier. We also did this outside. Luckily it was very nice weather. The sun helped the drying process quite well. You can clearly see now that the dark layer of photo sensitive material is gone. Very shiny copper now :) It even hurt my eyes when the sun was reflecting in it. If I counted correctly we did 26 PCB's the last two days.

I did take another interesting picture today. Here on the left you see the transparent print foil I started out with and below you see the result after the cutting process. I took this one before the the photo sensitive layer was removed, but I forget to photograph this in the previous post. So what did I end up with? A quick summery:

2 x Sample and Hold and Noise module, 4 x LFO, 2 x ADSR, 2 x VCA, 4 x DC/AC mixer, 4 x VCO, 2 x Minimoog VCF, 2 x EMS VCF, 2 x Steiner VCF, 2 x ARP VCF.

Sound promising right? But still a long way from finished. First thing to do now is to find and order all the components and solder them on the PCB's. And I need to find a solution to make the front panels. I'll keep you posted on the progress as always :)