Coin envelopes for SMT part, where?

Yes, that was a bad day. The first plane crashed a few miles into the flight but they survived. The 2nd one might have been overloaded for such hot weather, I don't know. Crashed right at the end of runway 31, two dead, two survivors (so far). Looking at the airplane it's a miracle anyone came out alive. What really amazed me is that they must have had fairly full fuel tanks for the trip to Mexiko but there was no fireball. AFAICT not even a minor post-impact fire.

I've become a huge fan of these:

robert

Get a jug of Downy (or any brand) fabric softener. Put it by the bench with a lid arrangement where you can just moisten the tip of your finger with about a half-drop of the stuff. Open the ziploc, and stick your finger in and wipe fabric softener all over the inside surface of the bag, like you were greasing a baking pan.

That should make it anti-static. :-)

Good Luck! Rich

You do realize that fabric softeners don't work by reducing static, they work by waxing your clothes so that they don't stick, right?

Besides, if you did find something conductive to smear inside the bags, it would quickly get all over the components, giving them each a conductive coating.

You have to be careful with using paper to store electronic products. Many papers use sulfur in one form or another as a sizing. The sulfur can attack the metal finish of your parts. Years ago, when device leads were silver coated, this really killed the solderability of these items.

Al

Please show me.

Thanks, Rich

Hmmm... maybe I was thinking of anti-static dryer sheets, but all the products I looked up all included "coats the fabric with a chemical" in their description of how it works, and include lubrication as one of the purposes of that chemical. I don't think that's such a good idea for electrical parts.

As for dryer sheets...

"How does Bounce® soften?

During the tumbling of the dryer, fabric care agents are transferred from the Bounce dryer sheet to the surface of fabrics. These fabric care agents have a lubricating effect on the fabric causing fibers to feel smoother and thus softer."

That's an interesting answer to a post that proposes using plastic containers rather than paper envelopes.

robert

Have you looked at the SMD containers with spring-loaded lids I suggested?

robert

I have some here but IMHO they aren't the cat's meouw. There is very little space to even write a row/column ID onto them and then that rubs off over time. And you can't write a P/N onto a lid so you end up having to run the laptop all the time for the database. Happened to me at a client. Needed a BAV99 and a 0.033uF cap. Laptop on -> Windows hourglass ... hourglass ... hourglass ... "DANG, come on!" ... hourglass ... ah, they are in E6 and G4 respectively. In the DOS days that would not have been an issue.

These also tend to get expensive at almost half a Euro a pop. A coin envelope retails around 3c a piece. And you can write part numbers onto those.

Interestingly the conductive versions of the Mira boxes cost a little more.

Another issue with boxes are rough road trips or flights. You'll have all the parts rattling against each other for hours. Not sure if that's good for things like

Very nice! It's too high to fit into the cabinet drawers here (don't want to leave all that outside) but that company has a lot of other interesting things I am constantly looking for when at new clients. Such as SMT resistor and capacitor kits at reasonable prices.

I print out little labels with part#/value and mfgr and affix them with good old UHU. I've given up hand-labeling for the reasons you stated.

But somehow the idea of paper envelopes doesn't appeal to me... I have this image of little parts that insit on wedging themselves into the furtest crevice of the envelope in a tweezer-resistant way.

robert

One of the guys in our local eda group uses the smallest of these:

He puts a stick-on label that covers half the clear top, leaving the other half see-through so you can see the value of the component and how many are left.

Then he puts the various boxes in a big rolling Craftsman tool box, one part type per drawer.

They do. But depending on how much you value your time they may pay for themselves after half a dozen parts that you didn't have to shake out of paper envelopes.

Good point. Paper envelopes aren't an insurance against that either, but they do restrict the motion somewhat.

robert

That's why you always keep plenty of spares in the envelopes. :-)

Actually, tapping the envelopes on a hard suffice (like smokers do with their cigarettes) works well to dislodge any uncooperative parts.

Some of your clients might find the storage system useful for their lab, too.

I used 2" * 3" antistatic plastic zip lock bags and the old cardboard tray bins for my bench at Microdyne. Everything was labeled with half of a self adhesive address label, and color coded. (the IT guys screwed up and ordered 15,000 of the wrong type, and brought them to me when they discovered they were single wide tractor feed instead of three wide.) :)

SMD parts were red ink, through hole in blue ink, misc. components (like switches and crystals) in green ink, and hardware in black ink. The value was in the upper left corner, and the stock number in the upper right corner, with a full description in the remaining space. It saved me a lot of time, making me the most productive tech in the company. I cut dividers from card stock to separate categories. I sorted parts by category, then value or part number. The stock numbers were there for reference, and to restock. Two of them held thousands of parts, in proper order and took care of 99% of my rework needs. I even kept some SMD ICs on the bench, and replaced them by hand, faster than I could even walk them to rework, and back. Most of the time I didn't even have to disconnect the board from the test bed to change a bad part.

Very nice. However, with hundreds of SMT parts that does become a tremendous stack of boxes. When I visit clients I try to squeeze it all into a pilot's case, or two if going by car.