PCB assembly costs

For the highball estimate you could probably pick up a used semi-automatic PnP machine, hire a guy to do the assembly with it, and still have enough to buy a Jeep Cherokee on Craigslist left over...

Indeed! Congratulations! ...Jim Thompson

~$50 per board sound about like what we pay. I like to have them break out the one time set-up charges, (NRE's) so you get an idea of what it will cost to re-order 100.

George H.

It should be around $30 per board plus Tooling (~$500).

Cheers

If I had a place to put it, that would be attractive eventually. Starting out as a virtual company.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I work for The Brat now; she's Vice President and she's one semister away from an MBA. Somebody's got to be the grownup around here.

Pity she doesn't do PCB layout any more; she was awfully good at it.

Is that the one where they suck the brains out?

Stay virtual. There is no reason in the world to buy equipment to make boards when there are so many services that do it better and cheaper than you could.

These days my business consists of getting a PO, writing a PO, shipping product from the fabrication house and paying their invoice while sending my invoice. No fuss, no muss.

ke

Eventually we're planning to do mixed-technology things such as ultrastable lasers, and besides, we have to do medium-fancy things at final test.

Besides, it's good if people have jobs. I'm nobody's idea of a manager, but the talent is in the family--it just skipped a generation. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

She says that some of it is good and some is obvious nonsense.

She likes the negotiating and pricing things best, I think.

~$2/part is premium territory indeed.

I pay around $250 per board (~1K components). The CM I use does split out the NRE but it's pretty trivial (couple of hundred bucks). The work is in setting up the PnP machine and they have to do that for every production run.

The CM I use is a bit more expensive than Advanced Assembly but they're local so it makes things a lot easier.

Huh.. ok thanks. So better to order 200 once... once you know it's good, and 200 are going to sell. :^)

George H.

I make a small board, about 4.5 x 0.85 inches, six layers, with just under 200 parts costing about $40. The assembly house buys the parts, the PCBs and does the assembly and testing and charges me around $100-$110 at qty 100 depending on the market prices for the parts. They do include a $200 setup charge in this price for each batch of boards. There are minimum buy qty on some of the parts, so the price varies from batch to batch depending on how much they have to buy vs. have in inventory. Of course the per board price drops as the qty goes up mostly because the part prices drop. I've gotten runs of some 500 for $70 per board.

OR, get a full auto used P&P. That's what I did, couldn't be happier. I do very short runs (don't like to keep a lot of $ of inventory around for a very small business.) So, I do anywhere from 12 to 60 boards at a time. Most of these boards take just a few minutes per side to assemble, actually my batch oven is the bottleneck.

Jon

Maybe. Cleaning will be the issue then.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Do you factor in the cost of the space it occupies? I'd bet that is more than the cost of the machine. If it isn't getting much use it is still costing you.

There was a phase in the UK where acquiring an MBA was a must have for anyone before they would be considered for senior management. This resulted in a large crowd (a cackle?) of MBA holders who quite frankly had very little grain in the silo. Thankfully this phase has now passed.

The latest fad is to acquire Chartered Manager status.

Well, depends on what you are doing. For some run of the mill stuff, you can use no-clean paste, and there will be a sort of waxy residue around the pads, but it doesn't cause any problems. If you do electrometers, then you have to clean like crazy. And, of course, the bigger you are, the more you have to deal with the waste disposal issue.

Jon