Thought this was interesting.

  interesting but what else can you say
Carl2

Yes interesting to find out how they do it now - and also the way it has changed over the past couple of decades.

I love seeing how the machinery moves when assembling things - I'm a big fan of How It's Made too.

I can say something about PCBs - when I studied Electronics at school or college we made some. It was very messy - it involved a copper surfaced piece of board. You used something like a marker pen to draw the lanes and connection points for the components. Then it was immersed in some kind of acid bath. I forget how long it was in there for, a long time though, I think we had our results at the next lesson.

So the acid would eat away the exposed copper and leave you with the lanes you had drawn. Then you got a drill of some kind and drilled out the holes for the components. And finally you mounted and soldered your resistors, capacitors etc and voila you had your gadget. You could buy cases and things and knobs to finish it all off. Pretty cool at the time.

I still wonder where I would have ended up if I had pursued it.

Freddy I remember doing the same thing with PCBs at tech when I did my City and Guilds electrical engineering course.

Cool, that was an interesting area of study I thought.

I seem to remember that you could get rub on lanes too for a smarter finish - like Letraset.

I've made single sided boards too. No solder resist or screen printing (letraset is a manual way of doing what screen printing does)

Most modern hi end boards are 4-12 layers. Being double sided, that's 2-6 layers per side. Each layer is a separate process as well as 2 x solder resist processes (the green/blue/red/whatever bit) and drilling and via (PTH) formation (the copper inside the drilled holes to link layers). Plus 2 x screen printing.
With all the custom artwork per board, making one offs is very expensive. Mass production is the only way to get the cost down and cheap Chinese labour of course.

Quote from: Snowcrash on March 16, 2019, 14:16:47 PM
Mass production is the only way to get the cost down and cheap Chinese labour of course.

We have a lot to thank China for 

We did the same thing in one of the classes I took with the added requirement to make the circuit as small as possible, I came in second while someone stood up the resistors and got a smaller board.
Made a few boards at home and still have some etchant. 
Carl2

If you ever want to make your own low cost PCB kit, this is a good open source design package.

http://kicad-pcb.org/