Hello, a question for those of you with manufacturing experience:
At what point do the added cost and efforts for automated assembly make
sense?
Assuming the board is mostly SMT, properly designed and not terribly
complicated or large.
I realize this is a very vague question. I am just trying to get an idea of
what kind of quantities people consider worthy of automated assembly.
Thanx,
Tony
"Tilmann Reh" <tilmannreh@despammed.com> wrote in message
news:g8mnt6$eb$1@cheetah.cadsoft.de...
Tony Rolando schrieb:
Hello, a question for those of you with manufacturing experience:
At what point do the added cost and efforts for automated assembly make
sense?
What /exactly/ do you mean with "automated assembly"?
Assuming the board is mostly SMT, properly designed and not terribly
complicated or large.
I realize this is a very vague question. I am just trying to get an idea
of
what kind of quantities people consider worthy of automated assembly.
The answer is ... well, it depends.
If the board has only (say) 10 components, we surely build up samples
(single boards) manually. However, we already assembled a single board
with several hundred components by machine.
Generally, using a pick & place machine is common for SMT at rather
small quantities already. OTOH, THT is commonly manually assembled up to
rather large volumes.
And if you don't have your own pick&place machine at hand, you'll
probably have a higher treshold for machine assembly.
Tilmann
Thanx for your comments. By automated assembly I was meaning pick & place. I
realize this was a vague question; I was hoping to get some various comments
regarding the topic.
Your last line really provided some insight for me...
And if you don't have your own pick&place machine at hand, you'll
probably have a higher treshold for machine assembly.
Where I work we contract out most assembly. We do somewhat large volume on
most products. We have planned some smaller products that will probably NOT
sell high volumes. I am wondering (aloud I suppose) what route we will take
for assembly of those boards.. I do not make these descisions, just
speculate I suppose.
Thanx,
Tony
"Tilmann Reh" <tilmannreh@despammed.com> wrote in message
news:g8mnt6$eb$1@cheetah.cadsoft.de...
Tony Rolando schrieb:
Hello, a question for those of you with manufacturing experience:
At what point do the added cost and efforts for automated assembly make
sense?
What /exactly/ do you mean with "automated assembly"?
Assuming the board is mostly SMT, properly designed and not terribly
complicated or large.
I realize this is a very vague question. I am just trying to get an idea
of
what kind of quantities people consider worthy of automated assembly.
The answer is ... well, it depends.
If the board has only (say) 10 components, we surely build up samples
(single boards) manually. However, we already assembled a single board
with several hundred components by machine.
Generally, using a pick & place machine is common for SMT at rather
small quantities already. OTOH, THT is commonly manually assembled up to
rather large volumes.
And if you don't have your own pick&place machine at hand, you'll
probably have a higher treshold for machine assembly.
Tilmann
Thanx for your comments. By automated assembly I was meaning pick & place. I
realize this was a vague question; I was hoping to get some various comments
regarding the topic.
Your last line really provided some insight for me...
And if you don't have your own pick&place machine at hand, you'll
probably have a higher treshold for machine assembly.
Where I work we contract out most assembly. We do somewhat large volume on
most products. We have planned some smaller products that will probably NOT
sell high volumes. I am wondering (aloud I suppose) what route we will take
for assembly of those boards.. I do not make these descisions, just
speculate I suppose.
Thanx,
Tony
