splicing tool

[spiyda]

I can't justify buying a splicing tool for the very few times I need to use it.

but it would be useful to be able to join tapes occasionally

I've been looking at some of the crimping pliers for the brass joining shims.. thinking it wouldn't take 5 minutes to make a jig.

they seem to have a flat base with just a couple of locating dowels...

but is the underside of the top jaw smooth, or is it a complicated shape to open up the little teeth?

[Gopher]

On the basic red handled tool, the bottom jaw has 4 locating pins ( 2 of which go through the shim and 2 spring loaded retainers to hold your tape. The top jaw is just the same width as a shim and has 2 holes in it for the 2 pins that go through the shim. All surface are otherwise flat, no teeth opening required. The tool itself is pretty much the same tool you might use for crimps with a couple of custom plates in the jaw perhaps not worth the £150 or so it cost if you have a spare mechanism and some metalworking skills.
I suspect time will be up for these tools and shims sooner or later, so many modern feeders seem to be sneaking in automatic splicing and short tape capabilities, something all small to medium batch size companies must have been begging for for years.

[spiyda]

Cheers,

exactly what I needed to know.
I have a crimp tool with no jaws sitting in a drawer waiting !

It would be nice to have every toll that exists but I am a bit of cheapskate..

To avoid splicing I try to design new circuits to use the parts already loaded onto the machine,
even to the extent of using three resistors instead of one !  Sometimes though there is no option but to swap something out
and that is where this will be useful.

They don't seem to come up on eBay :-(

[Gopher]

An excellent plan, sadly as a CEM we have multiple Analogue customers who love to use different weird values on multiple products and never contemplate making 2K1 using the 2K0 and 100R they already use or anything like that. I've even seen them use the same value in 3 different SM sizes plus through hole on the same PCB.
I got my tool from Benz, which now appears to be part of Somerset Solders, pretty sure they are cheaper these days http://www.somersetsolders.com/pcb-assembly-tools/splicing-tools-and-tapes/c111 than mine was.
For paper tape I like to combine both a brass shim and a double splice tape join, without this dual approach I find that in both Versatronics and Essemtec CLM feeders the bottom tape  simply isn't sticky enough to carry the tape around the bend after pick.
We don't seem to see much stuff really on ebay, awful chinese stencil printers, the odd versatronics machine, the many versions of the same solder paster dispenser and some probably awful pickup tools seem to be about the lot for smt.

[Jason]

I've taken to over-ordering parts (other than super expensive ones) to give me an extra
tail as I've found those brass splices more hassle than they're worth especially on paper
tape where the additional thickness causes jams as the parts are cheap.

Maybe someone has a tip to tell me this not the case, but all the splices that I've had put
in by a well known UK supplier have caused untold jams.

[Mike]

Run-of-the-mill parts  are so cheap that there's little need for splicing.
For more expensive parts, you only lose a couple at the start when you join the cover tape, and at the end, I just manually advance it for the last few parts when the end goes past the pin location.