| We are a small contract assembly shop hand placing SMT. We recently received a large contract for SMD that will require placement rates of at least 6,000 CPH. I am looking at Fuji, Mydata, Quad, and Zevatech. I have little experience with automated SMT. Does anyone have any experience with these vendors? Can anyone also recomend a good reflow oven? Hi Greg, I hate to be the one to say this, but this decision that you are about to make is one of the most important that you will ever make. So, be prepared to spend a lot of time. The wrong decision could cost your company tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next decade. Great, just what you wanted to hear, right? Anyway, I strongly recommend that you first meet with your colleagues and decide what type of smt work your company will pursue. This is a strategic decision that must mesh with the company's overall goals. Once, this is done, you will be better able to make a weighted list of capabilities that your smt equipment will need to possess. Then, have an initial meeting with each of the candidate vendors, to tell them what you're plans are, and to listen to their recommendations. You will learn a lot. You will probably want to modify your list of capabilities. Next, determine how you will measure the ability of each machine to meet your capability needs. You must measure. Do not use specs found in sales literature. For instance, to rate a machine's speed, do not simply take a percentage of the listed speed. Instead, take one of your boards to the vendor. Have them build it, with the correct components types and the correct number of feeders on the machine. Time it witha stopwatch. Use the same board and procedure to measure all the machines. You will be surprised at what you find. Use this kind of technique for all machine features, such as reeling and dereeling a tape feeder (this is critical to judging job changeover time), or loading a program, etc. I agree with the two respondants that you should add Universal and Philips to your list. You should also add Contact Systems. Jim Gustin
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