Oct 22, 2009 
“Despite the amount of effort put in to arrange the demo PCBs, dummy parts, and the amount of time and effort expended by the service and sales team to make the event so good, we will undoubtedly run another of these events in the future, as it really was a great success,” said Andy Jones, UK General Sales Manager.
The focus of the two days was to show live production and how to tackle real problems that can be seen in the manufacturing environment. The day was aimed at a practical event, and was not designed to be sales oriented. However, key customers who were looking at future investments attended the event. As a direct result of the two days, two orders were placed for the Tagarno Inspection tool, an order for a Speedprint printer was secured, and an order for a SAKI SPIder was recently placed by a customer who attended the day.
“Being users of machines in the field, the attendees generally have more experience with manufacturing issues than us as a supplier of equipment, and so it was very interesting to discuss such problems as PCB stretch, solder paste inspection techniques (inline and offline) and how to use AOI to improve the overall process,” said Jones. “Indeed, we tried to replicate a real manufacturing system by applying bar codes to each PCB so that we could trace each part of the process. We even linked the SAKI paste inspection machine to the SAKI AOI machine so that we could evaluate suspect solder joints and see whether the fault could be attributed to the printing process, for example. This is something that many users found of great interest.”
About Europlacer
Europlacer has been developing machines for electronics assembly since the 1970s and invented the intelligent feeder concept in the 1980s. After acquisition by Blakell Europlacer in 1991, the company moved away from split-axis to the inherently more capable X-Y architecture that underpins the company’s machines today. Europlacer’s policy has been to ensure wherever possible that technology purchased many years ago, especially feeders, remain compatible with the latest equipment. Europlacer designs and manufactures a comprehensive range of highly flexible SMT placement systems for the global electronics industry. For more information, visit Europlacer’s Web site at http://www.europlacer.com.
