Steven,

     One company I know of that does a lot of backplanes and press-fit
connectors is Sanmina (www.sanmina.com), there should be someone there that
can give you a lot more details than I can.

      I have built boards that had press fit connectors installed in them.
What we had set-up wasn't for high volume, we did maybe 250-500 boards a month
for this customer. But all it was, was a manual 2-ton arbor press with a
custom support plate that I had made, that had tooling pins that located the
assembly in the fixture. On the support plate just beneath the connector
location, you need to make a block that has holes drilled into it at the same
grid spacing that the connector has. The diameter of the holes need to be just
a RCH bigger than the holes in the board for the connector. This block is to
support the PCB securely when the connector is pressed in. I also had a piece
made to go over the Arbor Press head, that was the same overall shape as the
connector to evenly distribute the pressure across the connector.

       It worked great...but like I said it wasn't anything high-volume. The
two biggest problems I had were:

1.) Occasionally getting boards that were pushing the limits as far as the
tolerance for drill slop, makes for some difficult connector installation. I
was able to get the connectors installed most of the time, but I had to be
real careful and kinda' "shoe-horn" the pins into the holes. If you weren't
very careful, you could wind-up pushing the barrels right outta the board!

2.) Making sure that the locations were masked real good before they went
across  the wave. Sometimes we would run into a PTH component shortage, and
the boards would be masked and loaded-up with everything else waiting on the
shortage. If the boards sat around any longer than a day, the tape sometimes
would lift slightly and allow solder to fill some of the press-fit
holes...that's another way to push a barrel outta the board too...


                                                              I hope this
helps,

                                                               -Steve Gregory-

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