cutting circuit boards

FYI - Found a $50 diamond-blade saw at Lowes (4" Ceramic Tile Wet Saw by
QEP). Wouldn't be worth a darn for tile but cuts PCBs like a champ. Clean,
quiet and fast..
Jake

 

We used to use your standard run of the mill paper cutter. It worked well
for both phonelic and glass epoxy boards. Keep the blade sharp ;-)

 

We used to sneak into the machine shop and use a foot-pedal metal
shear. The machinists hated us for doing this, as epoxy-glass is hell
on shear blades.

John

 

That was the way the board shops used to do it many years ago when there was
a big tolerance. They would just print fablines and shear manually. Hand
shears were pretty popular back then too...Ross

 

A router table works great too if you get the correct cutting tools. Tulon,
Tycom and Precision Carbide make special routing burrs designed for circuit
boards. In the olden days they used to make a template with a couple of
tooling pins and hand routed everything. The nice thing about a routing
table is you can do cutouts, where with a saw, everything has to be square
or rectangular....good luck, Ross