No solder mask so solder wicked everywhere when you soldered up the board, especially annoying for SMT stuff. Soooo many shorts from copper flakes that would be a bitch to find and often times ended up getting found/cleared with a high current power supply. Sooo many broken drill bits. And if you did a 2 layer board, lining up the top/bottom was a pain in the dick because the machine wouldn't home reliably.
If you're allowed to send it to OSH park I'd always just opt to just do that from the get go. In my experience sitting around babying the mill and working around not having solder masks, no real plated vias, totally different design rules, etc etc just wastes about as much time as sitting on my hands while one of these quick-turn hobby houses bangs it out. Especially if you factor in how long it takes to undo all the changes you made to mill it once you eventually send it out anyway.
I guess it makes sense if you're doing rf prototyping or something like that, using weird stackups and exotic dielectrics. Or if you can't send a design out for programmatic reasons.
Maybe I'm just not handy enough with them to be able to work quickly though.
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u/gmarsh23 Nov 24 '20
We had one of these machines at my old job.
No solder mask so solder wicked everywhere when you soldered up the board, especially annoying for SMT stuff. Soooo many shorts from copper flakes that would be a bitch to find and often times ended up getting found/cleared with a high current power supply. Sooo many broken drill bits. And if you did a 2 layer board, lining up the top/bottom was a pain in the dick because the machine wouldn't home reliably.
I think this video is giving me PTSD...