Rich Olson shows us how he was able to laser etch the trace pattern onto some copper clad PCB using his laser cutter so that he could later chemical etch the unwanted copper away. I have tried something similar and was not successful since I was not able to line up the front and back of the PCB well enough for pads and vias to work. Rich uses a jig to allow the PCB to be flipped and slotted into the correct orientation without any manual hand eye fiddling. The final etch is done using Copper Chloride in Aqueous Hydrochloric Acid which is a cheap alternative to ferric chloride.