Steve,

Back in the 'way-back' machine, before I got into manufacturing and process engineering, one of my first jobs in electronics was out on the line hand assembling SMT boards. Today, I'm in the process of starting my own CM shop (after being disgusted with poor quality, attitude, and pay scale from Central Florida CMs). So, due to lack of funds (I like to have everything paid for) I'm hand placing SMT pcbs again until I can afford more equipment.

        When I used to place 1206/0805s on PCBs, I used to place them about 1 every 10 seconds (when in a good mood), which is 6 per minute, or 360 per hour. Now, I was generally faster than everyone else on the line, but generally for the purpose of quoting, I de-rate that better than 50 percent down to about 150 cph. So your estimate is in the same ballpark. If your folks are not going at that rate, there may be some other influencing factors like excessive motion (bins too far away), wrong tweezers (for us 5AR or 7SA are most efficient.) You can also stage boards, so that a person only works on a quadrant of a pcb and passes it to the next station. The biggest time waster on hand building pcbs is looking for those damn elusive reference designators on the board.

Anyway, hope that helps

Dave Ratte
President
Superior Circuit Technologies, Inc.
http://www.superiorcircuits.com
[log in to unmask]




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From:  Stephen R. Gregory [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:  Friday, September 25, 1998 9:08 AM
To:  [log in to unmask]
Subject:  [TN] : SMT Hand placing time standards...

T.G.I.F. Everybody!

    I was wondering if anybody has ever done any kind of time studies, or has
a good figure to use to plan how long it will take to manually place a board?
I know it depends on what kind of components are on the board...you most
definitely can load a resistor a lot quicker than a QFP, but I've been
"butting heads" with someone who thinks they can apply the same general time
standards that you use to figure the time it would take to load 
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