The limits of home pcb manufacture

[vvvv]

I've been making PCB's both single and double sided in my cellar for the past 30 years.Recently I decided to rebuild a compact flash project using the standard 50 pin CF connector instead of the 'Sparkfun' CF breakout board.

Using 'Eagle' design I had to resort to using a double sided board because there was no way the autorouter could complete 100% on a single side.Fair enough.But using the default settings, the via's were 4 or 5 mm in diameter.Since the smallest drill I have ever used practically is a 0.8 mm drill, so no go there.Increasing the via size actually doubled the number of via's - approx 45 and I don't really want to drill that many through holes and then use bits of wire to 'plate through'. A very tedious process.

Maybe I shall be forced to outsource my PCB prototype to a PCB manufacture for more complex boards.

[mikeinuk]

I have used a 0.6mm drill (Reduced shank PCB twistdrill) on occasions without too much difficulty. These are available in UK from Rapid.
Only problem is they do blunt fairly quickly if you're using FR4 or similar.
The tungsten carbide drills are best for FR4 but are too fragile for me ....