Blundell Blog

Leicestershire based JJS Electronics have placed an order with Blundell Production Equipment to upgrade their SMT and BGA rework capability. The new Ersa IR550 rework station with IRsoft profiling software and PL550 alignment and replacement system with process control camera will be installed shortly. 

JJS have also ordered an ERSASCOPE 2 under-BGA inspection station from Blundell combining standard BGA lens with both chip lens and look-down lenses. This will give them an unrivalled inspection capability. The Image-Doc software with measurement, image enhancement and problem solution database will enable them to rapidly identify and correct any defects on complex surface mounted assemblies.

For more information about these products and on the installation at JJS, contact Paul Cooper on 07880 546380 or Keith Gummer on 07770 615405.

Our range of high volume fume extraction systems remove and filter large air mass particles and solder smoke from the working environment. We also offer an extensive range of hoods, arms, fume cabinets and flat bed extraction trays. All systems have built in silencers to minimise noise in the production environment.

For more information call us on 02476 210270, or contact Keith Gummer on 07770 615405 or Paul Cooper on 07880 546380.

As the new UK distributor for Dage, we are getting to know our new demonstration X-Ray machine better every day. As an X-Ray system for electronic assemblies, I’m very impressed with the Dage XD7500NT. It gives brilliant picture quality and has a number of advantages over its main competitors.

It is “joystick free” - a simple computer mouse is used to move the x-ray tube around the assembly that is being inspected - much easier than using a joystick. Within only a few minutes you will be zooming around and magnifying in and out, getting oblique views and seeing the most amazing close ups. Most people start by X-Raying their mobile phone just for fun, and the tiniest lead on a micro BGA can be magnified to look like a piece of fairly thick string.   

Once you have had some fun, it’s time to get down to the serious business of finding the minutest of faults in complex assemblies, and there the Dage comes into its own. Seeing oblique angles of up to 70 degrees at up to 7,400 times magnification makes certain that you won’t be disappointed.

We are throwing our our doors to anybody who wants to come and “have a play” with the Dage machine. Call us on 02476 210270 to arrange a visit.

Accurate measuring of the temperature gradient within reflow ovens is an essential discipline with today’s complex electronic assemblies. With the high cost of some components and PCB substrates, it is not good enough to simply select a profile,  trust to luck and hope that the first board you put through the reflow oven will solder correctly.   

The Blundell PRO-filer is an advanced 6 channel data logger which gives real time temperature readings using RF technology, so there is no need for trailing wires which are cumbersome and can become tangled. 

Easy to opearte, it allows you to watch ther temperature profile in real time as the PCB moved through the oven,  and then analyse the information and print a comprehensive report of your reflow or wave soldering process. A report can also be printed out detailing process parameters for complete traceability of the soldering process.

For more information contact Keith Gummer on 07770 615405 or Paul Cooper on 07880 546380.

It’s official - we will NOT be exhibiting at National Electronics Week. We should never have been on the floor plan as we did not make a firm booking. None of our customers or the contacts we have spoken to over the past few weeks are going to visit the show, so we feel that to be there would be a waste of time and money.

Earls Court in our opinion is a bad venue, and June is a bad month for a show, just before the summer holidays. The exhibition no longer has a production focus, and it’s nothing like Nepcon, which it was meant to replace. We are staying away for this year, and we have asked the organisers to seriously re-consider the venue and timing for next year if the event is going to survive.

The extensive Blundell range of convection reflow ovens has been further expanded with the addition of the Technoprint Mistral 260 and Mistral 260 forced air  reflow ovens. Technoprint’s Quartz/hot air HA-06 batch oven is also now in the Blundell reflow line-up, together with their range of low cost manual stencil printers.

We at Blundell now offer the widest and most diverse mix of reflow ovens available anywhere from leading manufacturers such as Ersa, Iemme, TWS and Technoprint. Whatever your oven needs we have a model to suit the budget and the application and the backup service to go with it.

For more information call us on 02476 210270 or visit our Website www.blundell.co.uk.

Following our recent appointment as sole UK distributors for Dage, we now have an in-house X-Ray facility for inspecting printed circuit boards and electronic assemblies.

Our newly installed Dage XD7500NT is a state-of-the -art Real time Digital X-Ray inspection machine giving  2.0 mega pixel images and up to 7,400 times magnification. It will also provide 70 degree isocentric oblique views at high magnification and provides sharp, clear images with up to 65,000 greyscale levels.  

It is renowned by users as the easiest to use X-Ray system available, with no complicated joystick controls. It has comprehensive data logging and reporting facilities. We will be pleased to offer X-Ray services to electronic manufacturers as well as offering to install and support similar systems for our customers.

PLEASE CALL 02476 210270 FOR MORE INFORMATION

I’ve just got back from spending a couple of days looking around the SMT Exhibition at Nuremburg, Germany. The show was slightly smaller than usual and visitor numbers were down, but most companies put on a good show and it’s an easy exhibition to get around. It was a good chance to catch up with our main principals such as Ersa, Ebso, Dage, iPulse etc and to talk with old industry friends and associates.

Although they are suffering along with everybody else from recession, in Germany they seem to be able to retain a positive outlook and they all seem very bullish about a recovery in the second half of the year. With Productronica only 6 months away, let’s hope they are right. 

My discussions with industry contacts about the National Electronics Week show at Earls Court seem to confirm our negative views on that show. Very few production equipment companies are going to be exhibiting and there does not seem to be a last minute rush for stands. Looking at the floor plan, only half the stands have been sold, and there are only 5 weeks to go.

We are proud to have been the first European iPulse distributor to launch the new iPulse M8 SMT mounter. The M8 is a fully configurable flexible pick and place machine with an ultra-slim 1 metre wide profile, giving exceptional productivity per square metre of floorspace.

With 80 feeder positions, the M8 can be used as a stand alone machine or paired up with another M8 or a higher feeder count iPulse machine such as the M4 to provide a high capacity, ultra flexible component mounting line.

The new interchangeable feeder bank and matrix tray feeder system allows both the feeder bank and the tray feeder to be poitioned on either side of the machine, giving a further boost to line optimisation and machine up time.

The M8 is available with either 8 placement heads (19,000 cph IPC) or 4 heads (14,000 cph IPC) and will handle board sizes of 460 x 450mm or 510 x 450mm.

For more information call Nick Clarke on 07786 150864 or visit our Website www.blundell.co.uk

I am delighted to report that our “Technology Week and mini exhibition” has been a great success. Almost 200 visitors came through the doors during the week and they were able to see our wide range of PCB assembly, soldering and inspection products working. Now that there is no effective showcase exhibition for large production equipment, we will definitely be repeating the experience in the future.