Feeders, new hardware (split from Head wiping tapes)

Started by Gopher, March 25, 2011, 08:00:39 PM

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fcb

Quote from: Gopher on April 07, 2011, 10:19:01 AM
Tsssssssss! He's not looking that interested and anyway he's busy doing my 696 quote and a proforma for some nozzles........

Not that I'm a huge fan of rabid capitalism but there is the general rule that you charge what the market will stand ( we don't all live by it) and £20k+ easily pays for itself with even quite low volumes which means the market can stand it. Would Vivo's tech really scale down by 1/2 and would it be worth David's time selling something that has a lower margin for him when he seems quite busy enough with what he has?

Well I guess I'll find out if there's a market at the lower price point soon enough.  I'm aiming at the little-guy and whilst £20k+ may pay easily for the 'constantly busy' little-guy or small sub-contractor doesn't mean that they should have to pay £20k+ (and it's the '+' that matters!).

A program on Radio4 ('In-business') a few years ago was talking to some telecoms guy in India.  He was saying something to the effect that their customers (often remote farmers) didn't need cast-off Western mobile technologies, but they needed the state-of-the-art phones that had the best battery life, cameras, speed, robust designs so they could achieve the best spot prices on crops, diagnose arable (and livestock) problems, help educate their kids, etc... They also had to be cheap.

I'm actually thinking along these lines a bit, I think the 'little-guy' needs a machine that can do everything they need, fast to setup, quiet (as they might be sitting close by), robust (so they can physically move it), quick to rent/cost-effective to buy extra 'odd-ball' feeders, high resale value, run QFN/BGA if they need, fast to service, etc... and ultimately low-cost to buy.

Gopher

I was mainly thinking it's one thing for you to create this machine and sell it using whatever model, but quite another for david to cut down his and follow you in.

Do you have any plans for the rest of the process?  Manual stencil printers are quite expensive and not really that clever. The same could be said for ovens especially batch ones which I guess is what one would partner this with.

Gopher

I believe  the statistic is 67% of surface mount problems occur at the pasting stage, then there's storage and placement and the rest is reflow.

Even the little guy this machine is targeted at might find a toaster oven is not quite what they need. I'm pretty sure if we had one I'd have killed a few boards by forgetting them :).  The first issue is throughput, what can you get through yours? The second is covering your behind. When certain of our customers come across a problem they don't check their own design or software, they throw their toys out of the pram and blame us, having the equipment and data to say "no way, Jose" is invaluable.

That's not to say it's not perfectly good enough for a sizeable number of people who are making very small batches.

When we got the RV it sometimes did weeks at a time of nothing, then 20 boards. Still had a proper stencil and still had the oven, in fact the oven was here first from the pure manual P&P days.

Mike

I'm not saying reflow doesn't need to be addressed, just that cheap, reliable stencil printing is a higher priority as it is more critical to quality and there are already several very cheap, available  & useable reflow options available.
Throughput isn't high (but no worse than any batch oven), but that's not likely to be a big issue at the low end, and you can always buy multiple cheap toaster ovens for a fraction of the cost of a 'proper' oven.
A simple alarm timer helps avoid the board melting issue - reflow times are of the order where it is very easy to get distracted. I did once did forget a board for a coupel of minutes but it survives, although looks a little darker than the others in the batch!



Gopher

What a sigh of relief that must have been.
The ability to use "elemental?" or freebie stencils I would guess is most easily solved by making a standardish frame  based clamping and tensioning system to hold them. That would leave the base/table/whatever flexible enough to hold some common frame sizes. I believe some of the prototype pcb shops now do cut cost reusable frame systems of some form. Maybe that bit would then be an optional extra.

The Elektor one seems a sensible enough design but I kinda want the top half and it needs to be bigger, 450mm both ways would be better.


Mike

Quote from: fcb on April 09, 2011, 01:45:44 PM
As far as toaster ovens - those T962's on ebay look good value, any experience with them?
I've read a few reports of spontaneous combustion... Construction appears to involve what appears to be masking tape. From what I've read performance is somewhat patchy, especially towards the edges. I bought one a while ago but didn't like the lack of good visibilty so haven't used it in anger as I trust the combination of eyeballs and toaster oven more :


Having said that they seem to be popular with people reflowing dodgy Playstation BGAs...
Here are some internal pics