Good Morning Everyone!
 
We build a ruggedized multi-purpose meter here...it's quite a piece of
work I must say. Here's a photo of the finished meter:
 
http://stevezeva.homestead.com/files/Potted_Assembly.jpg
 
It's a stack-up of five assemblies:
 
http://stevezeva.homestead.com/files/Completed_Stack-up.jpg
 
then the whole thing goes inside the box and then potted with some
optically clear epoxy so that the LCD is nicely visible. 
 
My issue is with what is called the interface assembly:
 
http://stevezeva.homestead.com/files/Interface_Assembly.jpg
 
As you can see in the photo, there are 35 custom pins that are pressed
into the PCB, one-by-one, by a hand held tool that we had made:
 
http://stevezeva.homestead.com/files/Tool_and_Pins.jpg
 
Actually, they are lightly tapped into the board with a small rubber
hammer. The board sits on top of a teflon support block and the pins are
tapped in using the tool. The pins have to be pressed into place because
they are the main part of the "structure" of the stack-up, and they keep
everything aligned and perpendicular so it fits properly into the box. I
think we can do better than tapping them into place...
 
I'm thinking about getting a nice precise hand press and making a ram
for it that will hold the pins like this hand tool does, then making a
support block for the board that is movable beneath the ram to locate
each pin. I think it will be too much to try and come up with something
that can press them in all at once, or is it? 
 
We don't build a ton of these, but we do enough of them that I would
like to come up with something that is easier and more consistent than
the way we do things now. So I'm humbly asking for suggestions.
 
I'm looking at a press from Tox Pressotechnik, are there any others I
should look at?
 
Kind regards,
 
Steve Gregory
 
 
 
 

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