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I have an interesting question to ask.
Have any of you had success bending printed circuit boards?
I am making a costume piece helmet out of salvaged PCBs from old laptops and I would love to be able to bend the edges at 90 degrees to make it easier to rivet them together. I'm thinking about heating the PCB up and working slowly (like bending acrylic or plexy) but I'm not sure how this would work with the fiberglass and metals that exist on a loaded up board. I should mention that I want to leave most of the components on there for the look of the thing.
I have read some great advice in regards to cutting PCBs on this page and just thought I would also ask about bending.
Thanks in advance.
- Comments(1)
A****min
May 15.2019, 16:49:50
hat will certainly not work.
FR4 can be bent somewhat but certainly not 90 degrees. It will break instead. And heating it will not do you any good - it is not thermoplastic (unlike e.g. acrylic), so it will not get softer when you heat it. It will only scorch and delaminate.
Also, if you somehow manage to bend the board, the stresses on the bend will make the board unusable as any sort of structural element because it will crack and fall apart at the bend after a while. The epoxy in the laminate is designed to be hard, it is not really possible to make it change shape once it has set during manufacturing.
If you need 90 degrees for mounting, your best bet is to drill holes and put some mounting brackets or something similar on it. Or cut/break it and connect the pieces together at the angle you need using some mounting hardware.
Reply #2
It depends on the PCB thickness and the bend radius.
Since these are surplus/junk PCB's, I am guessing they are most likely standard 1.6mm/0.062", which will not bend at all, pretty much. 0.8mm won't really bend either. Once you start getting into 0.4mm, you can start to bend them quite well, but for a 90 degree bend, you would need some reasonable radius (something like perhaps an inch?).
One thing that may work well is to score the PCB on the back side almost all the way through, then you should be able to bend it while preserving the visual appearance on the other side - this will only work if you are bending an area without components though, since obviously the components themselves will not bend.
