Murugan

An early bird non-answer:

Does it matter? I don't know how much the material and etching your stencil cost
(without the reusable frame) but let's say hypothetically $500. With a 50 kilopass
lifetime, that makes it amortisable at just 1 cent per pass, as opposed to half a cent
for 100 kpasses. What is 1/2 cent as a percentage of your total end-product cost? I'll
bet it's less than negligible. Remember that a few faulty prints will cost you more, in
the long run, than throwing away a stencil which is approaching the end of its useful
life and trying to get an extra thousand prints out of it.

Vive le pragmatisme :-)

Brian

Murugan Vasudevan wrote:

> Hi technetters..
> here's an early bird question for this week...this one
> is regarding stencil wear. well, i have read in some
> literature that a fully hard laser-etched stainless
> steel stencil can last for more than a 100K cycles
> without ay problem. Now, the problem is, we are
> getting into this business of using a polyimide
> stencil. it is giving great deposits, good release
> characteristics, outperforms the metal stencil for our
> application, etc. etc. BUT...the one thing that
> concerns most of us is .."well, everything is okay
> NOW...but what might happen lets say 50K cycles
> after!?"..and i was wondering if anyone in this group
> has any experience with using such a stencil?" if so,
> i would definitely be interested in knowing how is it
> behaving on a long term basis..
>
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