Blundell Blog

If you think that the ever rising price of petrol and diesel is bad news, the increase in the price of lead free solder on the International markets has been even more dramatic.  Low SAC silver lead free alloy is now around £18.50 per kilo, up from £12 at the beginning of the year. High SAC alloy containing 3% silver is up to a staggering £34 per kilo today.

This vastly strengthens the case for investing in a Solder Recovery System. For an outlay of just over £5,000, the Blundell Soldabac reclaims at least 50% of pure lead free solder alloy from dross that is generated on the wave soldering machine. In most cases the Soldabac pays for itself in less than a year.

There is a video of the Soldabac on our Website (www.blundell.co.uk) Click on “Solder Recovery System” and go to the bottom of the Soldabac page. Or for more information call Neil Blundell on 02476 425987 or 0845 872 4975.

NEW PRODUCT - JUST LAUNCHED: the iPulse M8 high speed SMT component mounter is designed to address the increasing demand for maximising placement efficiency from limited factory floor space. The M8 has a slim 1 metre wide frame, whilst maintaining a high feeder count of 80 x 8mm feeder positions. What is more, it can achieve a placement rate of up to 26,000 components per hour.

The M8 uses a synchronised board and head motion system which reduces head travel by presenting the PCB in an optimised location for placement efficiency. It can be used as a stand alone machine or as part of a multi module line, or it can be added to an existing iPulse placement line to boost assembly speeds and productivity.

Another key feature of the M8 is the fast changeover carts for both tape and tray fed components. A complete kit of parts can be changed extremely quickly allowing the user to benefit from minimal downtime between batch runs of different PCB types.

For more information call Nick Clarke our SMT placement specialist on 02392 791044 or 07786 150864 or email him nclarke571@aol.com.  

The M8 will be demonstrated at National Electronics Week in June on the Blundell stand.

There are some truly desperate souls out there in the pick and place machine market. We have just heard of one supplier who is offering a “buy two and get a third one free”. Personally, I think that if you try to sell a professional item of factory equipment like a tin of tomatoes from Tesco, not only are you not only heading for trouble but you discredit your own product and service. We are talking about £100K plus items of precision equipment, not everyday groceries. The supplier of course will remain nameless, but I hope we are not going back to the bad old days of dutch auctions and wafer thin margins that leave no room for proper support and customer service. 

This week we took our first order from Poole based CT Production for a high speed PVA film coating machine for spraying conformal coating onto assembled printed circuit boards.

Up to now, our US partners PVA have been producing only flexible conformal coating spraying machines. These flexible machines have been very popular with our customers and we have sold in excess of 40 units in the UK. However, some customers require higher coating speeds, and PVA’s flexible multi valve systems are very accurate, but slower. This is because you have to change valves within the program to spray into tighter spaces or around difficult keep-out areas.

Film coating is faster. CT Production were looking for a machine that would give them a fast coating speed, and yet they still wanted to maintain a degree of flexibility. Thanks to PVA’s engineering team, we were able to offer them a machine with an airless film coating valve and two further flexible air assisted spray valves. This will become a standard product for PVA which will mean that we can offer customised conformal coating solutions to a wider range of customers from now on. CT Production will be taking delivery of their new PVA machine in May.

Over the past 2 decades, the repair and rework of printed circuit boards with surface mounted devices has become ever more important. As PCB’s become more complex and the value of individual components and PCB’s  increases, it becomes essential to have state of the art equipment for component removal and replacement. Rework of BGA’s is a particular challenge. Our German partners Ersa have been steadily developing and improving their range of rework stations over the past few years. They are a worldwide market leader in this important technology and we are very honoured to be their sole UK distributor and provider of service support.

Ersa’s new Rework catalogue is now available from our Website. Simply go to www.blundell.co.uk and click on “pdf Literature Store” and click the button next to Ersa Rework.pdf. Alternatively ask for a copy of the brochure to be posted to you by emailing paulb@blundell.co.uk. A whole range of advanced SMT and BGA rework and repair equipment is available and can be demonstrated at your premises by our mobile product specialists. For demonstrations, contact us on 0845 872 4975 or call Paul Cooper on 07880 546380 or Keith Gummer on 07770 615405.

The overly long and spread out Easter break is at last over. The level of activity and number of enquiries coming in remains high. We have just received our largest order of the year so far from an OEM company in the south of England who have decided to take all of their work in house. In spite of all the gloom in the media, I remain optimistic that the electronics industry will not be much affected by any downturn. We are, after all,  in an industry that had a natural growth and momentum from ever advancing techhnology.

Many electronics companies assemble prototype PCB’s or batches of one or two circuit boards. It makes no sense to program an automatic placement machine to do this kind of work. Fritsch SMT of Germany have long been producing manual and semi automatic surface mount assembly systems. They were one of the first to be involved in this specialised field in the early 1980’s. Now Blundell Production Equipment is the sole UK distributor for the Fritsch range of manual SMT workstations. The systems are modular, so you can start with a basic system and progress to a more automated station which guides the operator to the placement position. Components can be fed in tapes or bulk fed in bins, tubes or waffle trays. The ideal component assembly solution for small production runs, prototypes or one-offs. See our Website www.blundell.co.uk or www.fritsch-smt.com.

We have just activated new numbers for our main switchboard and fax. They don’t replace our existing numbers, but they will save money for customers who call us. They are 0845 numbers, which are charged at local rates wherever you are calling from in the UK, as long as you call from a BT landline. The numbers are:

PHONE NUMBER: 0845 872 4975

FAX NUMBER: 0845 872 4976

They should not be confused with 0870 numbers, which are charged at a higher rate than the normal national calling rate. I am not an advocate of 0870 numbers, I think that we should make it cheaper, not more expensive for our customers to contact us.

So, in future you can save money by calling or faxing us on the above numbers. There is actually another agenda. We are planning to move to a new headquarters later this year, so our numbers will have to change anyway. So by getting customers used to contacting us on the above numbers, there will be less disruption when we move, as the 0845 numbers will travel with us to our new premises without any break in service.

If you automatically assemble surface mount PCB’s, mistakes can happen in the assembly process. The inspection of the first off PCB is one of the most important steps you take. If the assembly machine is not correctly set up, and a mistake ‘escapes the net’ at this stage, the mistake is multiplied many times over, resulting in highly expensive rework of many boards. Maybe even hundreds off.

Here at Blundell, we have just launched a new product to overcome this problem. The “Extra Eye” is a semi automatic system that does not require any programming, and cuts inspection time by a factor of 5 to 10 times. At the same time the Extra Eye ensures that the PCB assembly is checked against the original build standard documentation.

The system consists of a specially designed high resolution scanner capable of inspecting all electronic components right down to 0201 outlines. It uses powerful software to boost inspection speed, reduce operator fatigue and ensure 100% inspection accuracy.

For more information, contact our product specialist, Keith Gummer on 07770 615405, or email him at keith.gummer@btinternet.com

In electronics companies of all sizes, hand soldering, far from dying out, is still being widely practised throughout the industry. There are always some components that cannot be wave soldered, and even automatic selective soldering machines have their limitations. The humble soldering iron (or hand soldering station as it should be called) often gets forgotton when considering investment in new equipment.

Since Ernst Sachs invented the first electric soldering iron in 1923 (hence the name Ersa (ERnst SAchs get it?) there has been constant development of the professional soldering station. Modern irons need to be ultra-slim to please the operator, yet need to be extremely powerful and responsive for lead free applications. This is why Ersa have come up with the “I-Con” which has an ultra slim handpiece measuring just 169mm from tip to end, and yet has a powerful 150 watt heating element and recovers from standby to full temperature in just 3 seconds! It is also packed with features like a motion sensor to automatically switch it to standby when not in use, password protection, process window alarm and it can be programmed via a USB memory stick.

Ernst Sachs would be amazed at how his axe-like electric soldering irons has developed! Have a look at our website www.blundell.co.uk. Click on Hand Soldering Stations. You can order the I-Con via our on-line shop at www.blundell.co.uk.