I was reviewing Stu’s articles on his “Ethergeist” blog again regarding his QRPp WSPR beacon, and was admiring his nice looking prototypes. I’ve goofed around with using tin snips to cut small pieces of copper clad and gluing them down to make solder pads, but Stu just uses a carbide tip scribing tool to cut straight lines into copper clad. The results look really nice, so I stopped and picked up a carbide tipped tool from Home Depot (about six bucks). Preliminary testing shows that it is necessary to use a straight edge and that it takes about ten passes to cut through the copper, but the resulting lines do look nice. I might use this on a future project.

Check out EtherGeist: Quick prototype printed circuit boards.