Altium DXP Routing Strategy For CNC Milling Of Boards

You've lost me. Hand solder or wave?

A lack of thru-hole plating pretty much assures no solder flow to the other side.

Vias, if you are referring to circuit connections through the board will fill or they aren't vias.

By milling PCB prototypes, do you mean separating (singulating) them?

You aren't machining the copper away to make circuits are you.

Maybe I'm just dumb.

The routing strategy isn't one suited for CNC milling (I'm assuming you're wishing to mill the copper plating away to form traces): multilayer boards, unless the circuit topology is comparatively simple.

G'day, you might Google the information, there are plenty of sites that explain the art of through hole plating. Via's are quite useful if you have no other means of doing things.

Would love to afford one of those mills myself.

Rod. J.

Single sided is my tip, have you looked for such a setup on your PCB software....

e.g. Can your PCB design software do single sided? It would be good if it could. Most of the ones I have used over the years can....

You may need to design double sided and then erase the lands on the component side and replace them with insulated wires that pass through the PCB at both ends and are soldered to the "solder" side at each end......manually I feel would be best....as I personally haven't seen software that you could tell it to do that, but there again, I have not worked with all software types.....

A lot depends on just how complicated your circuits are.....

For conventional production later, its easy to replace the wires with vias again.

I personally would have tried to route each side separately. For example, I would route one side completely, with say mounting holes in each corner with an eye for a component as a marker/guidance/orientation, probably in the ground plane if I was doing it.

Then, watching the orientation carefully, route the other side........your router and software needs to be fairly accurate.....use short pieces of copper wire soldered in to make the vias electrically connected.....it is a method I have used several times.

Another possible method would be to route two separate single sided boards, one per side, and to glue them together, so that the final board is a bit thicker, but would allow easy conversion to a double sided board later....soldered copper wire vias could also hold it together instead of glue, or a few soft rivets or whatever.....I have never actually tried this myself!

If a central ground plane is needed,,.as with some RF designs, I am sure that carefully routing on the second side of one double sided PCB, could be worked to achieve that between one single sided and one double sided PCBs, assuming a reasonably accurate router. Most of the time few connections will be needed on the screen, so relatively large holes would allow pins and vias room, but still maintain the screen....

Just a few thoughts......telling us your design requirements - frequency etc., would help as well.....

The OP might consider these↓ copper eyelets instead of wire for connecting the two sides.

Great idea Lyn. Forgot I used these myself some time ago.

Rod. J.