Screen Printers

Do a little bit of digging in the following areas:

- Service/Support in China; How good or how bad is it? - Ease of use; can the operators harness all the features? or will you be baby-sitting them? - Access to parts/spares pricing...follows under the above service/support in China, but these are key. - Do your "due dilligence", especially if you go off the list of printer companies you mentioned, if it is a local knock-off house in China, they will likely cut and run when trouble comes with "low-priced" equipment. - Be agresssive in your questioning PRE-SALE, if you forget to ask a question before hand it may be too late. After the sale, then your head is on the block!

I used to do equipment buy-offs for a stencil printer manufacturer here in US. Best way to get to details is create a buy-off list (same for all the printer companies), I suggest you see what they might suggest as "buy-off list" then add your own areas to verify machine/Customer support/reliability etc...use your head, proactively and you'll do just fine.

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Hi Ran,

Have you considered 2nd hand screen printers? We are an SMT equipment re-seller but also operate a subsidary CM factory in SuZhou, China . We use Dek 265 LT and MPM AP screen printers in our SuZhou factory and have the following in stock for re-sale;

- Dek 265 GS - Dek 288 - MPM AP/A - MPM UP 3000 - MPM UP 2000 - MPM ULTRAFlex 3000 - Ekra E1

Please send me an e-mail as we can help you identify the best 2nd hand equipment solution, support and service for your screen printer requirements.

Regards, Jason@tekmart.com

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Forgot details:

Use a sample product that you will be running in production. Let each Equipment vendor run a test to meet your requirements. Often with each of these machines (MPM/DEK/EKRA) the key machine features are:

-2D Inspection (for minimizing solder print defect) if you have very fast cycle time (under 10 seconds) then buy a seperate unit, a printer should be prinitng, NOT inspecting.

-Work-Holder/Special tooling; Very thin boards require fixturing to ensure proper printing. Also very large or small boards may also need special fixtures to ensure proper printing. Board edge clearance is an issue. Again the best way to see if each printer will work is take "worst case scenario" and see which machine works best.

- Automatic stencil cleaning. A must for high volume production.

- Offline programming (optional)

- An "enclosed print head" (Like MPM Rheometric/ or DEK Proflow CAN be helpful, but use care to check that your paste (or your customer's paste) works with these units, some pastes do not work well and may cause more problems in a HiMix/ low volume type of production line. Again run tests with each machine before-hand.

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