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Stencil cost VS apertures

A while back there seemed to be a major "difference of opinion" concerning "free" apertures - namely a fixed charge with no concern as to the quantity (in the stencil). Seems nobody believed me and certainly nobody ever heard of such a thing. Well, our fab house has been in operation well over 10 years, and in that time only three customers had work that required the extra charge that I referred to. Still, nobody believed me. I pointed out that their PCBs did not have multiple thousands of apertures like we have in some of our work. Even so, nobody believed me. This "problem" surfaces when the number of apertures per (finished) board times number of boards per panel is in excess of 5,000 (which limit seems to be typical). In order to present a more clear picture with some evidence, we hereby append a quote:

From: Stephanie [mailto: snipped-for-privacy@integratedideas.com] Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 5:00 PM To: Dustin Green [Surface Mount Technology Northwest Inc, Portland OR] Subject: RE: New Representation

Hi Dusty,

Yes, the pricing is still fixed up to 5,000 apertures. Each aperture over 5,000 is billed at $0.03 each.

Thank you,

Stephanie Hardin Director of Technical Services Integrated Ideas & Technologies, Inc.

6164 W. Seltice Way Post Falls, ID 83854
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Phone: (208) 262-7200 Fax: (208) 262-7177 Cell: (208) 771-0856
Reply to
Robert Baer
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Have you gotten a quote from a maker who uses a photochemical machining process, or just laser cutting?

Laser cutting is going to be slow if the thing is going to end up looking like a sieve. OTOH, you can make very nice fine-mesh screens with photochemical processes.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com
Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

Have you gotten multiple quotes that confirm that conjecture?

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"Large aperture counts can be completed faster and more efficiently with an electroform stencil due to the electroform process itself. This allows for a denser image area without any distortion due to heat transfer caused by laser cutting. (pad count: 1 to unlimited)"

If your best quote is in the thousands of dollars, as (IIRC) you said previously, picking up the phone might be worth it. IMHO, there's no comparison between time on a YAG vector processing laser and a plain old 4000dpi raster-output film photoplotter when you get into the tens or hundreds of thousands of apertures, which you must be for your cost numbers to be true.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com
Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

I would say that it does not make much of a difference, lots of apertures takes lots of time for the creation of the image for the photochemical process. And time is money.

Reply to
Robert Baer

No, a raster photplotter cranks out so many inches of plot per minute, regardless of complexity. Mine is really slow, at 0.6 IPM, but the fancy gear a board house would have is many times faster. Place the photo master against the sensitized stencil and expose, develop and etch. The entire process is done in "parallel" except the generation of the raster file, which typically only takes seconds on the computer, from the Gerber data.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

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