SMT rework shops near Sacramento or Bay Area?

Got any snow yet?

Terrible weather here, overcast skies, temperature barely touching

...Jim Thompson

We usually ask the prototype shop to make the PCB and mount the chips (0.5mm) and ship them together. If you let them make the board, they will mount the chip for a bit less than a cup of coffee. Global courier is usually 3 days, sometimes faster than local Fed-Ex.

Not yet, but it's rolling in. Yesterday was the worst, lots of uprooted trees, one of them split a house in half. A neighbor was retrieving her trash can before it became airborne and a big apple tree crashed down right behind her.

This is how it looks like around here:

Same here and they usually accommodate us. But sometimes it's for boards they did not assemble and it typically involves removal of a busted chip. Yesterday a consultant friend had that happen and Jim (RST) and I came up with a couple places he could use but none are close by. Well, then his power went, on account of the storm, trees flying sideways and all that ...

We do have the equipments here (San Diego) to rework SMT, but it's easy to damage the board. Sometimes, it's cheaper to move all the good parts to a new board. We have regular global courier shipments both way, so it's cheaper for us to ship them back to the factory.

It takes me a couple of hours to do a board (64 pins 0.5mm pitch) and only a cup of coffee for the factory to do it.

True. However, often I have only one board from a client. At larger clients it's no problem. The techs have nice Metcal unsolder/solder equipment and they can swap a big TQFP and such in minutes. That's the kind of service I am looking for.

Yes, I have something similar to the Metcal HCT-900-11 Hot Air Rework Station in my Garage. Even with that, I have to be careful not to damage the traces and/or loosen other parts. I use it for emergencies, but most of the time ending up sending them back to the factory.

Unfortunately, my newer parts are too expensive to ship out. So, I might have to do them myself.

We do it at times.

Thanks! It's in the files now. Wisconsin ain't exactly around the corner but Fedex goes there. Except right now, we are being pummeled by the weather.

We can do it too. If you want it done far away, it will cost you a Starbuck. If you want it done closer (San Diego), it will cost you a Wynn buffet in Los Vegas.

San Francisco looks like a war zone, a couple thousand trees down, flooding, a fair amount of property damage, kind of a junior Katrina. Lots of power failures, especially down the peninsula.

Winds yesterday spiked at 70 mph. It blew down a fence in our back yard and sucked a skylight off the roof. I went up there, found it nearby, and nailed it back down; only one layer of glass was crazed, so it's still watertight. Damn near blew me off the roof, and the raindrops were like ice bullets.

We have a break, but more weather is coming. The ground here saturates fast, so mudslides and floods are likely.

ftp://66.117.156.8/Storm1.jpg

We have a good assembly/rework house we use on the peninsula; I'll look up the name on Monday. Sometimes we do work for *them*.

In a dire emergency, you can send stuff to us; we have a lot of rework and inspection gear, including bga, and some very skilled people.

John

Similar here. The force was quite amazing. We have a fairly heavy wooden bench near the pool. Tied everything down except for that one because it would never move. Wrong! It lifted off almost vertically and then crashed into a flower bed.

Haven't seen any major damage around our house but couldn't check the roof, too windy. Luckily we had replaced it with steel, else we wouldn't have a roof now. Oh well, since the insurance has a $5k deductible we'll have to fix whatever broke by ourselves. That bench might mutate into firewood soon.

Don't do that, I know a guy who did slide off a roof and (by a miracle) lived to tell about it. This neighbor with the uprooted tree also had the whole east side fence blown over. A few years ago it was restored but they "re-used" the old posts. That's what broke it.

And some more trees to come down because now their roots are located in mushy soil that doesn't hold anything.

That looks like a picture-perfect paradise compared to here ;-)

Yes, please do, I'd appreciate that (others probably, too).

Thanks. Although that's what I am trying to avoid, bothering others whose normal tasks will become interrupted by such requests. Except in emergencies. Like right now everyone who has a chain saw is in high demand out here.

We've got 6 inches on the ground and about that much coming tomorrow about

Jim

-- "If you think you can, or think you can't, you're right." --Henry Ford

Grass Valley regularly gets this sort of stuff in the winter, and our weaker trees are taken out every year so they don't go down all at once. Wasn't all that bad up here. Power went out for fifteen minutes Friday around noon, but so far not even a flicker even with half a foot of wet snow.

My wind-o-meter has a peak gust of 90 at Friday around 11:30. It blew a few twigs off of the Douglas Firs around the house. I'm sort of worried about a dead DF about 20' from the house to the southwest, but it isn't big enough in diameter to do anything but knock off a few shingles even if it goes.

Hey, we're half a mile above you. We send all our floodwater down to YOU.

But I gotta comment. Do ANY of the old geezers in your area know how to drive in the rain? I'm coming off the Bay Bridge down 101 towards Foster City and there are all these bluehairs in the fast lane with a death grip on their steering wheels and hunched up over their wheels like that extra 9 inches will let them see better and going 30 in the fast lane? Not one, but HUNDREDS of them. Gawd, no wonder there was bent metal on both sides of the freeway a few thousand feet all along the roadway.

Sheesh.

Jim

And I bet they were all driving Volvos.

John

What was your FIRST clue (and you are correct, either Volvo or Mercedes).

Jim

-- "If you think you can, or think you can't, you're right." --Henry Ford

Driving badly, oblivious to the rules or consideration of others, is classic Volvo. Sort of like top posting.

John

Nope, nothing. And we even had a glimpse of sunshine at noon today.

ut

I hope you are all kept safe during the bad wheather.

We (dk-europe) have had some real strange wheather behaviour in 2007 - lets see how 2008 behaves.....

Regards

Klaus