About Photo Chemical Machining (PCM)
What is Photo Chemical Machining?
Photo chemical machining is known by a number of names including PCM, photo etching, chemical etching, and chemical milling. All of these names describe the same fabricating process. We use a stencil, which we call a photo tool, to expose multiple images of the parts to be made on both sides of a sheet of raw material that has been coated with a light sensitive and acid resistant material, called “resist.” After the images of the parts have been developed, and the uncured resist washed away, we remove the metal around the parts by dissolving it in etching chemistry. The resulting parts have no burrs or deformations of the raw material that can occur with other processes such as punching, stamping, and waterjet or laser-cutting.
Photo etching is frequently the process of choice because the tooling is inexpensive and can be produced very quickly, the parts are very precise and consistent, and the process is particularly effective when the shape of the part is complex and/or the part contains many holes or internal cut-outs.
Photo etching is effective for many kinds of metal. Ferrous alloys (steel), aluminum, cuprous alloys (including copper, brass, bronze and copper nickel, beryllium copper and more), nickel and nickel-iron alloys, molybdenum and more.
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Advantages
Phototools can be rapidly and inexpensively regenerated to accommodate revisions to parts.
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How Does it Work?
You send us data files (dxf, dwg, etc.) so that we can generate the phototools. We can work from paper drawings or sketches...
