PCB Etching from a 1980 Elektor Circuit Special

PCB etching is the subject of Bettina Neumryr’s latest video, and this one lands very close to home: the source material is Elektor Magazine’s July/August 1980 Circuit Special, specifically the “Variable Power Supply 0-50 V/0-2 A” article published on page 86. The project is a variable bench supply built around LM10 opamps, with adjustable voltage and current limiting, short-circuit protection, and a PCB layout printed right there in the magazine.

PCB Etching from an Elektor Magazine Layout

Neumryr’s video demonstration follows the old-school route: take the printed PCB artwork, prepare it for transfer, etch the copper, drill the board, and work toward a physical circuit. Today we tend to think of PCB layouts as files — Gerbers, KiCad projects, zipped fabrication packages — but in 1980 the magazine page itself was the distribution medium. The artwork was part of the project.
 

The power supply is also a neat choice because it is not a novelty circuit. The article describes a 0–50 V, 0–2 A supply using two LM10 ICs, with one section handling voltage regulation and the other handling current regulation. The parts list includes a 42 V transformer, a bridge rectifier, 2N3055 output transistors, and a 4700 µF smoothing capacitor. In other words, this was a useful bench instrument, not a blinking LED designed only to demonstrate a principle.

The Circuit Special Tradition

That context matters because Elektor’s Circuit Special tradition has always been about compact, buildable ideas. Some are quick hacks, some are serious instruments, and some are exactly the sort of project that ends up on a workbench for decades. The July/August 1980 edition belongs to that lineage, and Elektor will continue the tradition this August with the next Circuit Special on shelves.

Getting the Sizing Right

In Bettina’s example above, she snipped the circuit from the screen, pasted it into Gimp, and then scaled manually.

Curious as to the scaling in the original Elektor scans of this 46-year-old magazine, I downloaded the PDF from the original article page (free download for members, or €5) and printed it in Windows. I left scaling at “Actual size.” When printing like that, I found that my IC socket fit perfectly!

Of course, Bettina did do some cleanups and editing, as you’ll see in her video above, but I was pleased to see that the sizing survived perfectly from a 1980 printed mag, through professional scanning, to PDF, through my printer, and onto my desktop in 2026.

Since this is the underside of the board, I pushed the chip socket through the paper, and the fit was more than adequate.

A project printed in Elektor in 1980 is being rebuilt in 2026 via YouTube, using a process that shows younger makers how physical PCB production worked before cheap board houses made outsourcing almost too easy. It is not that home PCB etching is automatically the better way. It usually is not. Modern fabrication gives you plated through-holes, solder mask, silkscreen, repeatability, and far less chemical mess. But home PCB etching teaches scale, trace width, pad size, drilling tolerance, and the consequences of a marginal layout in a way a checkout page never will.

PCB Etching Still Teaches the Basics

For anyone learning PCB design, the value is in slowing the process down. You see the artwork as artwork, the copper as copper, and the finished board as something that has to survive heat, holes, and hands. That is exactly why old magazine projects remain useful. They were designed to be studied, copied, built, repaired, and occasionally improved by readers who had more curiosity than equipment.

Four-and-a-half decades later, that still feels like Elektor territory. The tools have changed, but the basic pleasure of turning a circuit diagram into a working object has not.