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

Printed Circuit Board Assembly & PCB Design Forum

SMT electronics assembly manufacturing forum.


Board Support for Printers

Views: 3927

#66524

Board Support for Printers | 5 June, 2012

I know this has been kicked around a lot but I'm asking for fresh opinions. We are close to buying new printers. One options we're considering from MpM is the auto pin placement for board support pins. 80% of what we currently run requires tooling blocks and supports, the other have dedicated tooling or carriers. Has anyone used this system? Would you spend 12K on auto pin placement or just stick with the grid loc system?

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#66525

Board Support for Printers | 5 June, 2012

We use both The pin placement works fine for the mpm. If its a dense board you have to to some double checking on the initial set up. On the dek we use Grid lock. For us its toss up which is better they both work.

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#66526

Board Support for Printers | 5 June, 2012

Do you see any issues with grid lock on double sided boards? My concern is that you set it up for the first board second side (populated side down) then you might have parts that aren't exacly at the same height on the next boards due to shifting or lifting in reflow = poor support.

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#66528

Board Support for Printers | 5 June, 2012

My personal preference is for manual set-up on the conformal tooling and have not seen an issue with bad support due to parts positioning variation... but if this becomes a legitimate issue, you can run in auto mode to reconform for each board (I like to use a "fixed" pin to take out any sagging in the board in this case). If you've not looked at it, you might want to consider this conformal tooling solution, in some ways prefer it over GridLock.

www.quik-tool.com

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#66530

Board Support for Printers | 6 June, 2012

You need to get your local rep to demo the grid loc. That is what it is for double sided boards. when the table comes up the pins adjust to the different height components. I also thought I saw a similar product on one of the advertising Panes on this web site. We want to support our advertisers.

Grid -loc is not the only board support option there are similar products out there.

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#66543

Board Support for Printers | 7 June, 2012

Thanks all for the input. We've been to both DEK and MpM for demos and seen the grid-loc in action. Think we'll probably go with that along with our h-towers and dedicated tooling.

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