I've definitely done some research into a few different manners of making my own PCBs, but I'm trying to find the right balance of doing things myself vs. time/cost associated. Since the majority of the PCB learning is going to be around KiCad, and I'll just be able to send the files along with $15 off to oshpark and get perfect boards in a week or two, it's hard to start the investment of fully custom boards.
> Since the majority of the PCB learning is going to be around KiCad, and I'll just be able to send the files along with $15 off to oshpark and get perfect boards in a week or two, it's hard to start the investment of fully custom boards.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Since it's just KiCAD and then you can get boards for cheap, why is it hard to start the investment?
I used to make PCBs at home, first using toner transfer and ferric chloride (never again, impossible to avoid staining everything in your lab), then with a UV lithography mask (photoresist and a laminator) and an exposure box used for making stencils. The UV stuff is actually pretty good, you can easily go down to 0.5mm pitch with some practice. Etching is still a pain, but I started using a clear etchant (sodium persulfate?) which at least didn't stain everything. I briefly experimented with laminated and cured solder masks, but that's also tricky. Never got round to silkscreening, though apparently you can do it with coloured foils.
Drilling is a pain in the ass. The bits break easily and drilling accurately, even with a press, is hard. Milling makes this so much easier. Then you need to think about plated through holes, do you rivet? Do you just put some 30 gauge wire and solder?
Nowadays I find I rarely need to rush boards and Oshpark is so cheap it's ridiculous. There are cheaper companies (I've yet to try Dirty PCB), but you get 3 boards, ENIG and really good tolerances for free. Even rush shipping ($20 international fedex) is cheaper than getting it done here in the UK. The only competitor I've found is Ragworm, and they're both more expensive and you only get one board with HASL.
Unless you really want a board made now, I would say just get them made for you. The quality is so much better without spending tons of time. Of course sometimes you really do want a prototype instantly and if you want to make a weird shape - perhaps a really long rectangle that would cost a fortune to get made, it's worth having the kit in your house to do.
On the milling side, I'd be tempted just to buy a Spokeo mill which can apparently do reasonably good PCB milling. Costs a lot, but at least it'll do other things as well.
I've recently got access to a lab with some very expensive rapid protoptying kit (from LPKF), which I'm keen to try out. It can even do 3D PCBs laid onto plastic components.
That's what I do as well. I switched to JCLPCB from Dirty PCBs and am pretty happy, but I was pretty happy with Dirty as well. They give me ten 10x10cm paneled boards for like $15, and because I design tiny boards I get around 100 of them in the end, which is 99 more than I reasonably need. It's so cheap, though, that it's not worth doing anything else.
This is where I'm at. If we see absurd leaps and bounds made in the homebrew milling/printing scene in terms of speed, cost, performance, then I'll start down that path, but for the time being the race to the bottom in terms of cost in small run PCBs is just too good for the consumer that it's hard to justify going totally homebrew.