Etching your own two sided boards is quite a hassle. Apart from getting your foil print right, having both sides in line and doing all the drilling, I found making vias with wires quite tiresome. The wires tend to leave the holes again whenever you try to solder something surrounding them. Especially when working with fine tracks (which is mostly the case with me, nowadays) this can be very annoying.
Luckly I found a forum where someone recommended to use small copper rivets for this. These rivets are only 0.6mm in diameter. Getting them into the holes is a bit tricky, but the its easy to open the other side with a small chisel. There exists, of course, also a special press for this, but the mindset of someone who actually will pay € 160,- for such a thing will forever remain unknown territory to me…
0.6mm is indeed very small...
Here, the rivets are used to conduct heat of a 3W LED to the back of the pcb.
Tags: Electronics
Can you share where you purchased these rivets?
I bought those at a german web store [1]. They come from a german pcb manufacturer called Bungard [2]. They have a specialized press for the rivets that is ridiculously expensive. I used a center punch to open them up instead.
cheers
ff
[1] Reichelt
[2] Bungard
You can flare the other side of the rivet with a thumbtack. If you think the German source for the tool is expensive, the US source is twice as expensive. I asked the Germans if they will ship to the US, and they said no. Sounds like some kind of scam.