Re: [EE] Intentionally delaminating a PCB

Neil <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.hardware.microcontrollers.pic
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Thanks David,

Have you done this or seen it done? I have the impression that once the 
sander gets to an inner layer of copper, it would tear up that copper, 
especially narrow traces.

Cheers,
-Neil



On 4/3/2025 3:56 PM, David Robertson wrote:
> I would just sand right through the layers with an orbital sander or
> similar, and use a flatbed scanner to get images of each layer.
>
> David
>
> On Thu, 3 Apr 2025 at 15:49, Neil <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm in discussion with a company who had a product developed by another
>> entity, but that other entity left the project (to develop their own
>> competitive product) and won't deliver final files.
>> The board had gone through several iterations to deal with noise and
>> heat, and at this point they have the schematic, BOM and physical
>> boards, but no PCB layout files, nor Gerbers, so they can't produce more.
>> That's where I come in... they are asking me to reverse-engineer this to
>> get back the gerbers so they can continue production. Yes, I'll verify
>> it's legit.
>>
>> The boards are at least 4 layers, so not simple to reverse-engineer.
>>
>> What techniques are commonly used to do this? I can start by removing
>> the soldermask, and then carefully grind away the fiberglass, but
>> there's got to be a better way... is there? Any chemicals to eat
>> fiberglass and leave copper? Or any way to use heat etc to intentionally
>> delaminate the layers so they effectively just peel off? Or any other
>> tools to assist with this?
>>
>> Cheers,
>> -Neil
>>
>>
>>
>> --
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