Laser Stencil Tutorial - laser beam characteristics Moderators: adafruit_support_bill, adafruit

[roo123]

In the tutorial: https://learn.adafruit.com/smt-manufact ... t-stencils

the solder pads are shrunk by 2 mil (2 thousandths of an inch = 0.05mm).

Does that imply that the Adafruit lasercutter has an effective beam width of 4 mil when cutting this material (Kapton film)?

Which lasercutter do you use? With what tech specs?

Anything you can say about how to achieve a nice narrow beam width?

I'm really motivated to get this to work because IMHO applying solder paste by hand is the WORST task in a SMT PCB job!

[adafruit2]

https://learn.adafruit.com/all-about-laser-cutters

[roo123]

Thanks.

In the tutorial you use 2 mil Kapton film.

Reading around, solder paste stencils seem to be thicker than that: upwards of 5 mil.

Any comments?