Best posts made by bikerMark

@sundberg84 thanks, prudence is needed indeed. I abandoned this scenario and now only switch the lower energetic part of the bike.

@NeverDie I recently finally made my first reliable PCBs, combining milling and laser. Both on the same Chinese build 3018. I enhanced my 3018 with a 7W laser diode a year ago. Selection of which one is the active device is done by a manual switch. Maybe some of my experiences are usefull to you or anyone else here.

For milling I nowadays completely rely on the heightmap of Candle (GRBL1.1 on a WoodPecker board, not the original board of the machine), the Gcodes generated by FlatCAM which are in turn based on the Gerbers by EasyEDA. Apart from the laser enhancement and the PCB, I feel no need to change anything on the machine anymore. I have had some serious thoughts on replacing the Z-axis part, and maybe one day I will do so.

I mill the isolation tracks in 5(!) passes. Time is no issue here; quality and reliability are. I use 30° piramyd bits, they are very well pointed and the machine has very little runout, so I realy need those five passes. I love these bits (eg https://tinyurl.com/yyg6hsft) : they're stable, sturdy, hardly breakable and when needed I can sharpen them myself.

The laser comes in when getting to the soldermask: it's cutted out in vinyl on a thin (0.1mm) sheet of silicone. Silicone does not melt, nor attach to the freshly cured ink and is reusable a couple of times.
After exposing the UVink and rinsing the unexposed ink with alcohol, I clean up the edges of the pads again with the laser on a higher power level.

It was hard to get the milling bit and the laser beam zeroed at exactly the same point. But once I had: what a joy to use the techniques combined!!