Hi John, Although I have never done anything like that..., and aside from figuring out what 'rust inhibitor' to use..., I suppose you could use a similar process to the creation of imbedded resistors... silk screen on the powdered ferrous material suspended in an ink of some sort and bake off the binders to cure it... ferrous materials would need to be encapsulated somehow to prevent oxidation though wouldn't it or would ferrous oxide still do the job? I have never heard of 'stainless steel plating' before... 303 stainless typically is a non-magnetic non-ferrous alloy... so you must be using the 400 series stainless in your design now which is magnetic and more susceptible to rusting. Sputtering comes to mind as another alternative... maybe you can get it deposited onto the surface that way but I doubt it will be very cost effective... If you could get metalized sheets of epoxy laminate made with the steel instead of copper you could etch them as individual layers to get the shapes desired and then quickly passivate them, plate them or seal them and add them as a part of your multi-layer construction in the board... possibly... it's an interesting problem and deserves some more attention... I wonder if the CTE of the dissimilar materials may play into unwanted stresses in the board too... need to think about it more... fascinating idea though... Best regards, Bill Brooks PCB Design Engineer, C.I.D.+ Tel: (760)597-1500 Fax: (760)597-1510 Datron World Communications, Inc. Vista, California -----Original Message----- From: John Parsons [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 9:03 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [DC] Ferrous Plating of PCB Happy Friday! I have a customer designing a product which incorporates an interrupt switch composed of a Hall IC, magnet and ferrous vane. Currently the vane is made of laser or water jet cut ferrous stainless. They would like to reduce the cost and lead time of producing the vane and are asking if a ferrous material can be plated to a PCB. Does anyone in the group have any thoughts or experience that they can share? Regards John Parsons ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- DesignerCouncil Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF DesignerCouncil. To temporarily stop/(restart) delivery of DesignerCouncil send: SET DesignerCouncil NOMAIL/(MAIL) Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DesignerCouncil Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8d To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF DesignerCouncil. To temporarily stop/(restart) delivery of DesignerCouncil send: SET DesignerCouncil NOMAIL/(MAIL) Search previous postings at: www.ipc.org > On-Line Resources & Databases > E-mail Archives Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------