Well I tested printing directly onto Pyralux copper and it was a massive failure. Not even one spec of ink stayed on it and the print came out a inch off the location of the copper. Chatgpt said this is because copper can't hold a electro static charge long enough to take ink onto itself or w/e. Ah well I can fall back to the method I already used successfully.
On that note, I realized printing my blue circuit is bad since a black and white printer won't print as densely and darkly a blue thing as it would a black thing so I have to make my circuit black before printing it. Also I should set my dpi to 600 dpi instead of 1200dpi which will create denser thicker prints for better transfer. Also I should select label paper instead of heavy paper which will work better. Also using Lumicolor Straedler pen is not good as it can be undercut easily supposedly. Better to use oil based marker instead. So I ordered that in 0.3mm tip. These are all improvements chatgpt suggested and I plan to use when printing onto the pcb transfer paper and hand touching those up if needed. I'm getting ready to make a bunch of flex pcbs for finishing this motor controller. I already started doing it.
Another disaster happened to me as well: my highside circuit I just soldered the solder wick wire onto, when I was analyzing it closely on the front I noticed that excess solder from the drain side of it oozed and dripped toward the front side of it and attached to the gate pin! I heated up that attachment point from the front side and my capacitor and resistor from gate to source both came off from the heat! Anyways I heated it up to remove that short circuit and used a xacto knife to wedge between the gate pin and back of mosfet's drain pad which had a solder bridge. I got through the bridge successfully but now have to redo the gate to source resistor and capacitor. Ugh! Two steps forward one step back. Then while inspecting and cleaning everything I moved the control circuitry a bit too much and it broke off for the 3rd time! So that has to be done again. This time I'm using flat flex for it. I've had it with the non flat flex variant breaking. The flat flex is way more solid mechanically. So that's a redo needed. Ugh.
Then to top it all off, the solder wick braids recent idea I had to electrically isolate their run near to the mosfet so that they aren't live for very long - which had to do with wanting to eliminate any short circuit risks in their longer run as well as remove any potential for antenna affects - yeah... well after cutting them all in half to do this transition idea, as I was doing it, I realized the surface area where the hand-off takes place between one section of solder wick braid and onto the next seems very small to me (2mm wide by 6mm long) and it seemed to me that the passage of heat across this tiny bridge of thermal tape might be severely compromised and would depend on how tight I made the squeeze of the two pieces of solder wick braid together as well. And I'm not sure I can clamp it tight enough with just tape wrapping it firmly. And if it gets quite hot I'm concerned electrical tape will get gooey and come loose over time and not hold it well. I'm not sure how tight kapton can wrap things I've never used it before so I'm inexperienced with using it and trusting it is hard without experience working with it. This all cumulatively gave me enough doubt that I said heck with it, I'm going to revert to the former plan to just run it live over to the water cooled pipe 3-4" away and use the thermal tape at that junction point where it wraps the pipe. This ensures alot of metal volume is directly tied to the mosfet which means more heat sinking directly with little risk of trapping heat near mosfet - which could happen if my thermal tape junction of copper braid to copper braid were to fail for example by being pulled apart by accident for any reason. Too much risk there IMO. And the risk of a short on account of live wiring it for 3-4" with the live wire sheathed in window screen to emit heat freely but not touch anything I feel is low enough risk IMO. So whatever route I choose has tradeoffs and I feel reverting to my former plan is more robust and foolproof thermally with some minor electrical risks that are mitigated by fuses and careful execution in general. So yeah I had to solder the cut pieces of solder wick braid back together again which was another pain.
Note: the next time I solder the heatsink braids onto the drain I plan to use less solder paste so it doesn't ooze and drop forward onto the front circuitry on the front face of the mosfet by accident. I also plan to insulate the front side's circuitry beforehand so even if solder did ooze that way the insulation barrier would prevent short circuits and make the oozing no big deal in theory.
So yeah it was a tough session but I learned alot from the mistakes etc.