Post : DIY SMD stencils made with a craft cutter
URL : http://hackaday.com/2012/12/27/diy-smd-stencils-made-with-a-craft-cutter/
Posted : December 27, 2012 at 8:00 am
Author : Brian Benchoff
Tags : smd, SMD stencils, stencils
Categories : tool hacks

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/stencil.jpeg

Unless you'd like to spend hours with a toothpick and a tub of solder paste, stencils are the way to go whenever you're placing SMD parts. While most commercial and industrial SMD stencils are made out of laser cut stainless steel, [Peter] figured out a piece of plastic and a $300 craft cutter is equally well suited for the job (http://www.pololu.com/catalog/product/1268) .

[Peter] has spent some time making SMD stencils out of polyester film in the form of overhead transparency sheets. This turned out to be a wonderful material; it's dimensionally stable, commonly available, and just the right thickness suggested for SMD stencils. The polyester film was cut on a Silhouette Cameo (http://silhouetteamerica.com/silhouetteCameo.aspx) , basically a desktop-sized vinyl cutter aimed at the craft market.

Stock, the Silhouette Cameo rounds off corners, not something [Peter] wanted with features only fractions of a millimeter. He came up with a tool (https://github.com/pmonta/gerber2graphtec) to convert the paste layer of a Gerber file into separately drawn line segments, allowing him to cut SMD stencils for 0.3 mm pitch components.

It's a great piece of work to make very fine pitch stencils, but we're wondering if this tool could be used on the much less expensive Cricut (http://www.cricut.com/home/) paper and vinyl cutter that is unfortunately locked down with some very restrictive software.

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