DIY Solder Masking for PCB Making at Home

Solder Mask Protects the Copper Tracing of the PCBs & Gives a Professional Look. Here is About the Solder Masking for DIY PCB Making at Home. Though previous various publications we talked about making PCB at home. These days, there are also flexible PCB mainly for creating connector ribbons with some components. Any kind of PCB better gets a mask.

Solder mask is a thin lacquer-like liquid which is usually applied to the copper traces of a PCB. The epoxy liquid is the lowest-cost solder mask. There are photo imageable solder mask, dry-film photo imageable solder mask. These for the commercial systems are silkscreened or sprayed on the PCB or vacuum-laminated on the PCB. These processes typically go through a thermal cure or ultraviolet (UV) cure. In design automation, the solder mask is taken as a layer of the PCB. Solder mask not always used for hand made PCBs but it is almost a standard part for mass-produced boards. The commercial system commonly uses photolithography.

There are mainly two DIY methods. One is using paint, which is common and one instructable can be found here :

There is a dry film solder mask. They are like films and delivers professional-looking result. Two Instructables can be found here :

Dry film solder mask will need two things for a better result – one is a laser printer and another is a laminator which can handle PCB like “card”. I favour laminator over ironing for PCB making. DuPont Riston is a dry film photoresist used for this purpose. One roll of DuPont Riston costs around $90 and measures too huge for our works.