Nub bying p&p, stencil printer and reflow.

Hi. the res/cap is mostly 805, solder paste will be led free and will only have a few fine pitch IC on each board. The boards will contain between 140 - 160 components and will run a production of 300 - 500 each day with only one or two different boards. The production will only go part time and need to be somewhat efficient when it is running. The labor cost is high in Norway (50USD/hour each worker incl taxes etec) so would be nice to keep the labor down. I think the evest P&P looks alright as a starter but the reflow might be a bit small? The production is for industrial use and the pcb's are gold plated.

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agree, if you have fine pitch components the placement rate will be much less of what you see in the catalogues as they quote 0805 components placemen rate.

I have one year log for one of our machine which is quoted to be 6400 cps and for one year average on high mix fine pich components + down to 0402 generic components, the real average speed is about 1500 cps i.e. 4 times less what is quoted as speed in the brochure. on some boards this can rise to 2000 cps, on other 1200 cps, this includes jobs change over time etc. total i.e. number of boards * number of components / time spent these boards to come out of the line.

to achieve the catalogue speed you have to place just one and same component, taken from one feeder which is placed at closest to the board position, such board case doesn't exist in real life, so this "speed" is just for you to compare machines, you will be lucky if you can achieve 1/2 of this speed on real board and when you add the downturn time for programming feeders setup etc this effective cps rate will drop down to 1/3 - 1/4 of what is quoted.

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Thank you for good answers. The Evest EM-780L machine that I linked to further up has a IPC-9850 at 25000 so if I get half I might be able to get the work done.

How many people do you have working on the SMT line? Do you have all you're machines inline?

What I'm thinking to do is to have a semi auto stencil printer, load the pcb's in magazines and set it in a loader for the pick and place and have the PnP inline with the reflow with an manual inspection inbetween the PnP and the reflow, and finaly a unloader at the end. Is this a good or bad ide?

Looking forward for you're clever respond.

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Hi. I have looked on Essemtec but not asked for a quote. I've always tough they where over my budget since they have intelligent feeders etec. Then it would probably be roughly be 1k each feeder? The Evest feeders starts as 250. So here I could get a PnP with 40-50 feeders for 60->70k and that is not so bad for a new machine? They feeders are pnematic... But I'm guessing I cant start driving a Ferrari as my first car, but start up with a low prised Hyndai and work my way upwards;)

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