Hi everybody!
We are excited to add 3 new cartridges to our store. Read on to learn more!
Experimental Conductive Ink
We have added a new type of conductive ink! It’s available on our store here for a ridiculous 75% discount!
What’s good about this ink?
A better soldering experience
If you have struggled with hand soldering or re-working in the past, then this ink will be a pleasure to use! The solder wire will wet the printed pads right away - almost like copper!
Burnishing, a soldering iron temp of 180C / 356F and generous flux is still required, but you’ll notice a night and day difference compared to our standard conductive ink.
The same conductivity
You can expect your traces to have the same resistance as our standard conductive ink. Just be sure to select the correct ink profile when curing your board! This ink does have to be cured at our maximum heater temperature.
Almost no oozing!
Without getting into the details, the rheology of this ink works in our favor and you can expect close to no oozing during printing. This means higher quality prints!
So what’s the catch?
This ink is more brittle.
If you picked up the drill attachment and you’ve been creating double sided boards with rivets, you’ll have to be careful when you mallet in the rivets as the ink can fracture. We’ve put together a mini tutorial / guide for this new ink - check it out here.
If you are mainly printing single layer circuits - then this is not a concern.
This ink is experimental
It means the R&D has done extensive testing on it and has found the optimum printing and curing parameters. It also means the ink formulation is new and the exact shelf life hasn’t been determined.
If you pick this ink up we’ll be contacting you to get your feedback.
T5 Solder Pastes
We now stock T5 versions of our existing solder alloys! Before today we only offered T4 paste, but we are excited to offer both T4 and T5 now!
Wait… what does T4 and T5 mean?
Solder pastes are defined by a type i.e - Type 3, Type 4, Type 5 and even Type 6. The type of the paste indicates the average particle size in the powder used. There’s a good article here, but in summary, the higher the type, the smaller the particle size.
So what does this mean?
In general, you can expect smoother printing and less clogging.
When the V-One dispenses solder paste, it is essentially forcing the paste through a tiny orifice (230 microns for the standard black nozzles) so smaller particles will have an easier time going through the nozzle.
Note: Even with the T5 paste, it is important that you purge the nozzle if you haven’t used it in a while!
Just a heads up - for now all bundles & V-Ones will keep shipping with the T4 paste, but if you pick up one of the T5 pastes and your dispensing quality improves… please let us know! And speaking of feedback…
We want feedback
If you’ve been using the V-One for a while, please please please tell us what you like and dislike about the V-One. We’ve created a feedback survey that only takes 1 minute to fill out.
Your feedback will help us understand exactly what we need to improve and in what order. A few of you already filled it out, but if you haven’t fill it out here!
That’s all for now - as always, feel free comment below or shoot us an email!
