Conductor 3 vs 2 Brittleness/Adherence

[wleismer]

I just recently started printing with the new Conductor 3 ink, and I am running into an issue. The ink was dispensed and baked well enough, however I noticed some pad-to-pad shorts. In the past, with Conductor 2, I could easily take a scalpel and remove material between pads to salvage the PCB for soldering. With Conductor 3, it appears that the pads can be lifted from the FR1 substrate far easier than Conductor 2 just by trying to cut gaps between two shorted pads.

Has anyone else run into any brittleness or adherence issues with Conductor 3 when compared to Conductor 2?

[pwnOrbitals]

Just received a V-One and running into the same issue - tracks very often cleanly break off or lift from the substrate even with great printing and baking conditions. Maybe there’s a trick to avoid it ?

[Scratch5457]

I’ve had some serious issues with adhesion, to the point that boards printed with conductor 3 are basically single-use items. Reworking a pad is not even remotely an option. Touching an iron of any temperature will immediately destroy the pad.

To get around this, I’ve taken to lightly sanding boards before printing. The conductive ink has basically zero adhesion to the smooth FR1, so giving it some texture to bite into has helped significantly. Though the problem with this method is it becomes incredibly difficult to remove uncured ink. You also need to back the extruder away from the substrate just a tad more to account for the surface roughness. I’ve been using a wet sanding process with 120 grit paper, but you’d get better results with even higher grit.

It’s harder to get a decent print this way, but once you do it’s as solid as a commercial laminated FR4 board. I can actually work with these boards and replace components without destroying all the printed traces.

[wleismer]

Thanks for the info! I think that method will be worth trying. I have been avoiding using a soldering iron and doing all of my rework by placing the PCB above the hot plate of the V-One, heating to about 140C, then using a hot air gun to reflow components and rework traces. It takes some effort, but I have only seen a couple of traces be destroyed by the heat. They were particularly thin ink depositions anyway. All other “properly” deposited conductive ink seems to hold up decently well to repeated hot air reflows.

Overall, it is becoming harder and harder to get reliable prints out of the V-One, however. The amount of time I spent on my recent project printing, drilling, riveting, assembling, and reworking 5x PCBs was far above the effort, time, and cost of just ordering traditional FR4s from China

[Nathan_at_Voltera]

Thanks for all the feedback on your experience with Conductor 3 so far and sharing some of your work arounds for adherence. We’ve noticed some variance lot to lot with this newer material and have been continuing internal testing on it to get the best results.

We just pushed an update to the curing profile for the current and next lot of Conductor 3 that cures it at a higher temperature. Our materials team has found that this has helped with adhesion. If you’d like to give it a try its for lots ChattyCerberus and DapperDrider, they should automatically update in your software if you’re connected to the internet.

The old heating profile was a preheat at 90°C for 5 minutes, then bake at 120°C for 15 minutes. And the new profile is a preheat at 90°C for 5 minutes then bake at 170°C for 15 minutes.

[lillianfoster]

Hello,
You can apply the ink uniformly, ensure proper baking, and use precision tools to gently remove material between pads. Make sure the ink is applied uniformly, avoiding excessive thickness, and verify that the baking process follows the manufacturer’s recommendations for time and temperature.