Making a PCB The Old-Fashioned Way
The article discusses the traditional method of making a printed circuit board (PCB) by hand. It highlights the process of plotting out the board, experimenting with materials, and using ferric chloride for etching. Ultimately, the result is a functional smoke absorber for soldering projects.
- ▪Modern PCBs are typically designed using EDA software, but some still use traditional methods.
- ▪The author experiments with resist markers and etching compounds to create a PCB by hand.
- ▪Ferric chloride is used as the standard copper etchant for PCBs.
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| Original publisher | Hackaday |
| Canonical URL | https://hackaday.com/2026/05/21/making-a-pcb-the-old-fashioned-way/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 05:00:54 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T05:07:00.540Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T05:07:00.540Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Te09gYH1xcIL |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Making A PCB The Old-Fashioned Way No comments by: Julian Scheffers May 21, 2026 Title: Copy Short Link: Copy Nearly all modern PCBs are designed with the help of EDA software, but not all of them. [ALTco] shows us the process of plotting out a board the old-fashioned way — by hand. Back in the day, drawing out the traces on a PCB lead to beautiful, smooth lines that [ALTco] wanted to imitate. But first, he needed to figure out how the rest of the fabrication process worked. He starts by just experimenting, both with the “resist” markers and paint, and the etching compound. Things rarely work first-try, and neither did his home-made etchant. So then it was time to buy some ferric chloride, the standard copper etchant for PBCs.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hackaday.
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