Printed Circuit Board Assembly & PCB Design SMT Electronics Assembly Manufacturing Forum

Printed Circuit Board Assembly & PCB Design Forum

SMT electronics assembly manufacturing forum.


X-Out boards

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#90892

X-Out boards | 18 April, 2024

Hello SMTnet, I would like to know from you guys your experiences of how the use of X-Out boards impact your units per hour on your lines. There are different scenarios where some of you might have only one lane reflow oven and others may have 2 lane reflow oven, do X-Out boards really impact your lines capacity? Thank you in advance for your feedback. Regards.

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#90897

X-Out boards | 23 April, 2024

of course it has an impact on line capacity.

x-out boards have a shorter cycle time, but you have to push more panels through the line to reach the order quantity

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#90898

X-Out boards | 23 April, 2024

Hi there,

As long as there is a standard procedure (choosing a so called bad-board-sensor [BBS], machines being taught in with this option, and operators trained) the impact should not be high.

True that you have to push more panels through. The thing to be careful here is not to create a bottleneck. Even with X-Out boards, your cycle time should not be less than any other machine (printer especially).

If your cycle time on pick and place is reduced under the printer's cycle time, you can clearly understand that the impact will be very high and your productivity will fall.

Regards, Tom

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#90899

X-Out boards | 23 April, 2024

The impact of course is a lot less for newer PnP, but for older machine there might be different story. What if the bad marks not being read correctly? The result would be "good" board being skipped, while "X-out" being loaded. That would waste much more time & material to fix those mistakes.

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#90900

X-Out boards | 23 April, 2024

Yes X-outs impact cycle times. Firstly, unless your board house is adding the bad marks you have the added labor of doing it yourself and programming your machines to look for them. Additionally, it adds time to each machine in the line (except for screen print) to go look for the bad marks. As others have pointed out here, older machines can be finnicky with bad board mark detection so you can have downtime screwing with that as well.

They are a pain but the reason everyone deals with them is because the price of boards is lower when you accept x-outs.

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