OSHPark PCBs

OSHPark.com is PCB service in the US. I’ve used them a few times. Here is the results of my most recent order.

OSHPark charges $5 per square inch. The size of your board matters! You get three board and free shipping. This service only allows for two layer boards, OSHPark can do more layers, you just can’t use the prototyping service. Read about the prototyping service here.

The boards are well made, always purple, and do not have pre-tinned pads, all of the pads are “Electroless Nickel Immersion Gold”.

The boards ganged in batches. You’ll have to wait for a board to fill before it goes to manufacturing. This makes the fabrication time vary with each order. OSHPark says:

…will ship within 9-12 calendar days. 90% of our 2 layer orders ship in 10 calendar days.

Since the boards are ganged in a batch they end up with these little “nubs” along the edges. Not a big deal, I like to sand them off. The boards are made of fiberglass, make sure you do this outside and don’t inhale the dust!

For this order the total cost was: $34.70 for 6 boards. That’s $5.78 per board. Not bad but not cheap. Not a bad price for prototyping. Seems tough for them to compete with the Chinese services. I placed my order Oct 22 and received it Nov 3, 12 days.

Here are a few pictures.

What are these? The smaller board is for a NPN Germanium Fuzz Face. I have a NPN Germanium transistors, I thought I’d use these up, building with a PCB will so much easier!

The second, larger board, is a Univox Super-Fuzz. I built this a few times before. With a larger PCB. I decided it was worth trying to shrink this down to fit in a 1590B.

The last picture shows the fiber glass “nubs”. I sanded these off in the backyard with a sanding block in a few minutes.

I just soldered these up.

I need to order some more parts before finishing these…