UV Exposure Units

[eight]

Hi there,

Does anyone know a good source for cheap/used uv exposure units?

I really can't justify clawing together £120 for a unit just to do a little bit of pcb development. But suprisingly, there doesn't seem to be much choice.

Please help an impoverished young wannabe.

 

[jbartos]

Suggestion: Visit

http://www.suncheck.com/store/default.asp

etc. for more info

 

[nbucska]

Cheapest, fastest and good enough:

Make/get a test picture and make a test board.

Add/insert the test pattern into the artworks in the future
boards so you can detect the aging of the UV lamp it time. <nbucska@pcperipherals.com>

 

[salec]

I didn't actually did this, but several friends of mine did:

Buy a plain white-light fluorescent &quot;bulb&quot; (i.e. Phillips), a starter and appropriate ballast choke (will depend on bulb nominal power consumption).

Wire the ballast, starter and bulb socket of some desk lamp you have (the salesmen should be able to explain the wiring).

Now you have very strong white light desk lamp ;-).
What I still haven't mention is:

The bulb has a strong UV light source (a small tube filled with low-pressure mercury wapor) inside of outer glass ball, whose inner side is covered with fluorescent powder that produce white light.

So, what you need to do is to carefully remove outer glass of a bulb and you have yourself a UV lamp.B-)

Avoid exposure of your (or any other person's or pet's ) skin and eyes to UV light!B-(

 

[eight]

Thanks all.

Some stuff to play with there.

 

[nbucska]

To SALEC: How do you measure UV with a fluorescent tube ?
To 8 : E-mail if you need more detail. <nbucska@pcperipherals.com>

 

[salec]

To nbucska:
Actually, I don't. I just break outer glass bulb and expose inside tube which emits UV-only. I have heard that fluorescent rods (and complete bulbs) actually emit not only visible but also a portion of UV light, but I have no way to examine that. Do you know an inexpensive way to measure UV?

To Eight:
UV is a must if you are erasing EPROMs, but for PCB photo process you can use a 500W &quot;photo&quot; (reflector) type visible light bulb, instead. It's a kind of bulb photographers and video people use.
It should be 30cm above the set and exposition time is some 6-15 min. Perhaps that would be even more affordable?