Good prototype assembly houses?

I don't know of any, but I sure could have used one this morning!! Can you post (or email me) the contact info for WD Burch?

I just spent 2 hours hand-soldering a board with barely a dozen components.

-Only about three of which I could actually "see" with the naked eye.

For anyone lurking, I have confirmed that holding 0603 and 0806 style "chip" components with spring-loaded tweezers works surprisingly well. Place a small dot of solder, then tweezer one side while you hold it in place. Cool. Solder the other side. Be warned though, if you have crappy tweezers the part can go airborne (and you will NEVER find it.)

Now, what I want to know is: Does anyone make an adhesive that you can spray (or otherwise affix) to the bare board so you can just tack the parts in place BEFORE you try to solder them??

-mpm

Here goes:

They are in Laguna Niguel, California.

Not that I know of. I often hold parts down with a toothpick when soldering. When at clients I have sometimes even picked up twigs outside and filed them into "toothpicks".

A spray would cover the solder lands which I can't imagine being a good thing. Probably you can get a footswitch-operated small quantity dispenser though.

Well almost, just get a Sipad adhesive solder paste/flux. Parts just stick to the board so you have a chance to re-position them. You do have to send them your bare boards though.

Norcomm Electronics up here in Grass Valley needed to establish a SMT facility for its own line of products (DTMF encoders for mobile equipment) and they then went into the prototype assembly business to keep the equipment running.

Call Robert Waidtlow (owner) at 530.477.8400 and tell him you are a friend of Jim's. I have absolutely no idea his pricing, but judging from the stuff he sells, his quality is superb.

Jim

Thanks, Jim, just did. The person who deals with board assembly there is Joseph. I just sent him the data files for a quote.

BTW, they've got a web site in case someone else is also looking for contract assembly:

I know. Joseph worked for me as a gofer/juniortech when he was in high school about 20 years ago.

Jim

You guys must have a close-knit community up there in Grass Valley. What is a gofer?

Hell, there are only 10k people in the whole damned town, and less than a thousand electronikers. We all cross paths at some point in our career.

A gofer goes fer coffee, goes fer parts, goes fer supplies, goes fer ...

Jim

I guess I probably should have told you that the owner (Robert) is a flying buddy of mine and that I have my name in his aircraft logbook a few times for owner-installed avionics.

Jim

Ah, then he would definitely know where Cameron Park is :-)

I hope they can crank out a quote quickly. It's one of those more urgent projects where the first (reasonable) quote gets the business.

We do protos as well.

Thanks, good to know for the next time. However, I've shipped it all off yesterday morning. Fedex came in a bit early that day with the bare boards and they tested out ok (rest of the box was pre-packed and ready to go, just in case...).