robb wrote:
....

for all the help and taking time to paste an example i really
appreciate the suggestions everyone has made.

Probaby no plated through holes this go around, though making a
copper electro-plating tank for through holes sounds like fun.

Well, it gets old after a while. I used to do all aspects of PCB
manufacture when I worked for a PCB house as a teenager.

The plate through tank is filled with a saturated solution of
copper sulfate. The solution is made by filling the tank with
a sulfuric acid solution, about the same concentration as in a
car battery. The copper anodes are added until the solution stops
eating them away. The plate through tank needs to be highly agitated
to keep the solution in the holes very fresh. So, imagine a tank
full of concentrated sulfuric acid at a roiling boil.

First, you drill all of the holes that are to be plated.

Then you scrub the board so that the copper is free of any oxide,
or fingerprints and give it a bath in a strong lye solution to
remove oils.

The next step is to seed the holes in the board with an electroless
copper plating solution. Metal doesn't like to plate on insulation,
and it really doesn't like to plate in holes, so it needs the thin
copper film to help it start.

Then the boards get clamped firmly to a copper cathode bar, and
get inserted into the copper plating tank. Because the metal doesn't
like to plate into holes, you need to use an excessively high current
density, and high agitation. The tank looks like it is at a roiling
boil. The plating "rectifiers" are 0 to 6V, 300A power supplies.

When the boards are done, the corners will have mossy copper growing
from them, and the surface finish will be uneven, so the board needs
to be sanded down to a nice flat finish. This is done with a brush
machine that does both sides at the same time. Be careful not to
remove too much copper!

Next, the boards get silk screened with resist and go into the
solder plating tank. When they are done there, the silk screen
resist is removed (trichlor was the old way), and they are tossed
into the etching tank, where the solder plating acting as the resist.

After they are rinsed, and dried, they go into a hot bath of
peanut oil where the solder is "reflowed" which basically means
the plating of tin/lead is melted into an actual alloy.

Then comes more trichlor, and the final drilling, and then milling
to shape.

-Chuck