Saving Some Coin With 3D Printed Stencils

Per Hackaday, there's a DIY answer to the high cost and long delivery times of metal solder paste stencils: print them yourself. Using Gerber files from your PCB design, you can feed them into the Stenchill tool or a KiCad plugin to generate files for an FDM printer. Load it with PLA or PETG, configure your slicer for the necessary accuracy, and you've got a working stencil in hours instead of days at a fraction of the price. The trade-off: printed stencils won't match the precision of metal ones for microscopic pads, but for prototyping and typical boards they work surprisingly well. For makers tired of the expense and wait, it's a viable alternative.

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