I quite often have the need to run off small volumes of trivial PCBs - adaptor from connector A to connector B, that sort of thing. Single sided without much drilling I can probably etch myself, but double sided gets a bit fiddly especially as I tend to make small things with fine pitch surface mount and small vias. Quite often the board isn't bigger than 1-2 in^2.
There's a variety of 'pool' PCB places around, that collect up orders and do a mass fab run every so often, on a $few per in^2 basis. For example:
The trouble with these is the location of the pooling. BatchPCB fabs in China, ships to US, and then dispatches from there. If it's going to be fabbed in China it would make sense to ship to customers direct from there, or better ship the whole order to UK and then it's a simple second class stamp from there. Or simply fab in the UK, might be better than circling the globe.
So can anyone recommend a cheap PCB pooling service that works sensibly for people in the UK?
Thanks Theo