[TriEmbed] Reasonable PCB Asembly

Fred Ebeling FEbeling at ECPDesigns.com
Wed Jun 11 18:39:14 CDT 2014


I was wondering, if you have never done this before, why do you believe you can do better than
$8.00 a board.  You are correct 200 is a small run.  To build your board, some one has to purchase
and stock all the components.   Load them onto a SMD placement machine.  Apply solder paste, 
place all the components, run it thru a IR oven and then verify by hand that all the solder joints
are ok.   OH and they have to have space to store all the stuff while its being done and after its
done before shipping.  So I say around 10 minutes per board when you add up all the handling 
and setup.  So the company is going to average around $40 dollars an hour.  Which once you remove
overhead, hour rate for employees, calls on the phone to fix things.  Means they will probably
break even or loss money.

There are some shops in the Raleigh area:

Anuva formally IES Lighting near Aviation and Evans
GRT on the east side of NC State
Catalyst by the airport
GMI in Charlotte
Fawn 

Good luck in your search.  

Fred Ebeling
ECP Designs



From: Adam Haile 
Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2014 2:43 PM
To: triembed at triembed.org 
Subject: [TriEmbed] Reasonable PCB Asembly

Now that I'm on the mailing list I figure I'll dive right in...

Working on designing a geeky clock for resale and trying to make it all surface mount components in an attempt to save board size and possibly component cost. The board has about 40 components on it in total that are surface mount and 4 more that we were planning on soldering by hand because they are through hole (and that would've added even more cost to the assembly). I've been working with Advanced Assemblies out in CA because they work with my usual PCB fab house but they are quoting me at around $8 per board for the assembly (in quantities of 200 board). I realize that at such low volume I'm probably going to run into some pretty high prices, but it still seems to me that I can do better. I've looked around online but figured I would see if any of you have direct experience with other companies and if you liked them, should stay away, etc. We'd love to go the surface mount route instead of making it a user assembled kit (hoping for a broader audience) but that extra $8 would mean the retail price would be much higher than we would like and think is reasonable. 

Any suggestions for assembly companies (and even PCB fab!) would be greatly appreciated.


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