Over my working life, I’ve had a sideline of repairing electronic consumer goods. Many were, and still are true single sided boards. A current product that comes to mind is flat screen TVs. Most still have a single sided board for the power supply and a multilayer board for signal processing.
Dry joints still occur on the single sided boards after a period of use. Heat caused contraction and expansion together with automatic soldering and lead free solder are the biggest culprits. These commercial products recognize this problem (to this day) in part by using rivets for the large and heavy and heat prone components (I suppose a single sided board, a few rivets and a single solder pass, are still cheaper than a double sided board in some commercial products). The not so large or heavy components (high wattage SMPS resistors, amplifier modules etc. that have suitably large holes for hand stuffing) is where long term use with single sided boards causes problems, and where I still make a few “tax free ” dollars.
Again, I stress, this single sided board problem is really only in high usage, reasonably cheap, domestic consumer products, and, of course, some of the ultra cheap rubbish coming from a certain Asian country.
I did, at Clayton Vic. Au. Dry joints were a no extra charge, no option for pretty much all the TVs manufactured in the 1970s.
Philips CTVs were a great product. I made a lot of money out of repairing those from out of warranty to end of life, at round the year 2000. A lot more money than I did as a junior engineer working for them for about 6 years.
I suppose, to be fair, a compromise was struck over the PCB stuffing. It was all done by hand in those days, ad a larger hole meant quicker and easier parts placement, but more susceptibility to eventual dry joints.
In the 90s I worked with products using Paninsert through hole machines for bandoliered resistors. These required oversized holes. I’m not sure when these machines came into use.
Depending on the size if your board, your reasoning is just nonsensical these days.
100mm x 100mm board from China are, circa, $2 for 5 units. If yoh dont mind waiting you can get delivery for inder $5.
Anyway, temember Google is your friend (hint hint)
Found the dollowing lonk.whuch should get you stated
My experience was with low wattage and light parts in telephone sets. These do get a lot of dropping abuse, but the pcb was small and very well supported.
If you ae not designing for very high volumes or to use milling, forget about single sided
Unless you are trying to do millions of boards and prepared to have a punched
PCB you can not save money.
And the assembly image you share was of through hole components which are not the low cost way to make assembly.
Your approach will save approximately nothing on PCB and will likly add assembly cost and component cost.
Assuming you find a manufacturer that will make your single sided PCB for you . . . just don’t send them the Gerber for the top (component side) copper layer.
Do all your routing on the bottom side (non-component side), use wire links where you absolutely cannot find a route and have to cross tracks. Keep your tracks chunky for added strength and stability.
So as per your images and the fact you have Silkscreen on the component layer you would send the following gerbers:
So I do single sided PCB’s reasonably regularly and that is because of IMS. You just don’t send them the BOTTOM layer information, but you should talk to the fabricator to align on this
No, I just didnt see the point in having 2 layers if i was only soldering on the one side. I thought it might save some money but to be honest like people have said above it doesnt really cost anything at all buying from chinese fabricatiors. I want to support local business but it’s too expensive. I got some quotes from a few companies in the UK but they were 10x the amount. They gave me 1 sided quotes after I sent gerbers without top layer file. Lead times were awful too.
I do not know about new single sided boards. But older boards which were single sided generally had through hole components on top, with the plating on the bottom. EDIT: (If you think about it, that is pretty much what you need to do if you are wave soldering, which I think was the predominant method.) So if the THT component is soldered snug to the board then the plating cannot easily lift, because the THT component is not free to move either closer to or further from the board.
I suppose that a single sided board with only SMT components might have more of an issue of pads lifting. But of course, SMT pads are not plated through on even a 4 layer board unless you have via in pad. One other variable is that single sided boards were generally made with cheaper material…phenolic instead of FR4…and for some reason I think that copper adhesion was not as good.
Also, for those of us who didn’t take apart electronics in the 1960’s - often time the leads of components were “clinched.” They were folded over onto the pad, locking the part to the board. That made the board more reliable, but made harvesting components as a kid difficult.
High quantity single sided had always been the bottom side only. Even more recently when some SMD was added on the underside with THT on the top, to be soldered by the wave solder machine. This was a horrible production process for some feature telephone sets.
” dollars.
