Hi folks,

While board panelization may be nothing new for some of you folks in TechNet
land, it's a fairly new concept for us and we are experiencing some growing
pains.  We manufacture Hi-Rel, low quantity, high mix boards.  Of course
some of them are odd shapes and must be panelized to feed through our
processing equipment.  The problem is when we depanelize the boards - we're
getting a great deal of damage even when our best & most careful operators
break the panels apart.  The typical panel has throw away tabs attached to
the board with perforated webs.  There's a great deal of variation in the
web configuration - number of holes, size of holes, distance between holes,
routed slot width, board thickness, board material, etc.  We've been
experimenting with pre-scoring the webs and this has helped tremendously,
but isn't something we want to do in a manual operation.  We don't have any
automated machinery to rout out the completed assemblies and really don't
want to go this way due to the programming expense; we figure an
intelligently configured set of webs and tabs would be more cost effective.

I have a few questions:
1. Is there a standard web configuration?  If so, where is it published?
2. Short of automated machinery, is there a tool out there that can break
the webs without causing damage?  We have a nibbler but have found that it
sometimes causes more problems than it solves.
3. How are you folks configuring your panels & breaking them apart?

Thanks for your help,

Kathie Lambert
SMT Process Engineer
Northrop Grumman
Baltimore, MD

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