From a company that crafts using circuit boards... (Score 5, Interesting)

As the owner / primary crafter of girlgeekboutique.com, where we make jewelry and accessories out of circuit boards, I have tried various methods. I'll start with the one I currently use.

1) Ginormous guillotine paper cutter bought cheap off craig's list: cheapest, safest, fastest method I have found -- but with some significant limitations
Upsides:
* Cheap, easy to find, easy to use
* Chops straight through the boards with (almost) no fine particulates escaping into the air. Very little to clean up.
* If you can hold the board steady (with pressure and sometimes with the aid of high-friction material between the circuit board and guillotine surface to help prevent slipping), you can cut very nice straight lines
Downsides:
* You can only cut thin circuit boards -- well, unless you have a newer, sharper, larger guillotine than I have and/or are much stronger
* You can only cut straight lines

I also use a sander (in front of a powerful window fan that takes the particles out of the house) with fine grit paper to smooth the edges.

NOTE: I use thin, component / solder-free circuit boards found at an electronics surplus store. Dealing with cutting lead solder and components, I have decided, is just a bad idea in many ways. I will sometimes pry the components off and make them into jewelry separately (see http://girlgeekboutique.com/ for examples), but I do not use circuit boards with solder on them. It is sad to see them go to waste (though, of course, you should always recycle them!), but there are simply too many toxic materials in them for me to feel comfortable cutting them up and giving / selling them to others. Most other crafters feel the same way, and use circuit boards without components.

Having said that, some other crafters are more hardcore and *do* use recycled circuit boards (with, at least, the large components removed), solder and all:

2) Scroll saw
Upsides (second hand):
* One of my fellow Etsy sellers uses one with "metal/plastic blades" and she creates very unique circuit board jewelry, sometimes in curved shapes like hearts (Clone Hardware)
Downsides:
* She goes through many blades just for one circuit board
* I tried one and, though I was probably not using the "right" kind of blade, it kept catching on every raised contact or bit of solder, making it impossible to smoothly run the board through
* All of the above warnings about toxic particulates being thrown into the air

I have also had several people suggest dremmels to me, but those also solve none of the problems mentioned above.

3) High powered sander
Upsides:
* With the right grit sizes and sander power, you can sand straight through a circuit board relatively quickly and then swap to a finer grit to take care of details and smooth off the edges
Downsides:
* EVERYTHING is being turned into dust. I only tried this outside on a windy day with a mask on, but it was still just a very bad idea -- even with solderless circuit boards.

I appreciate the ideas in the above posts and plan to try some of them. I am particularly interested in the ring saw. Does anyone have actual experience cutting circuit boards with these?

Sincerely,
  "Captain Girl Geek" of girlgeekboutique.com
        (a long-time slashdotter who just created a new account because she hated her old username >^-^ )