| We are currently looking into purchasing a high volume, medium mix production line. We are considering several different vendors and I would like to know if current users of Siemens equipment are happy. Are the machines maintenance intensive? How is the software? | | Thanks | Mike |
I hate to be the only one with bad news, but we are having hours of downtime per week per machine for issues which we should not be seeing on a mature platform, the S20's. We are continually replacing the head and vacuum cards, replacing the vacuum plungers, fighting errors from every axis in the heads, and every vacuum error programmed into the machine. We have had a field service guy living at our facility M-F since last Thanksgiving, all parts and expenses paid by Siemens.
If you will be placing a high number of IC's with the machine, ask for the #720 nozzles with the filter material. We are helping them develop them here, but I assume they will be universally available soon. They claim the high number of IC's placed is the root of our problems, but even with the filters stopping the dust from the laser scribes we still have problems.
I was very impressed with the feeders when we first received them. I liked the solid construction and the variable pitch. BUt, now that we are placing 0603 with the S20's the techs are going crazy pulling the feeders apart to remove parts which are jamming them up.
I have also been dissapointed with the system controls for the heads. If one of the 2 heads has a problem, you can't disable it and just have one head run. Liekwise for individual segments/nozzles in each head, it's an all or nothing machine.
We were looking at the new HS50, and in our demo they could not get the pairs of gantries to have the same cycle time, even when only placing 1 part type. At best there was a 15% imbalance between the gantries.
We are looking elsewhere for our next line(s).
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