Good Day All!

     I'd like to solicit some opinions from those who have had experience with
Contact component locators. We're a start-up contract assembly company here in
the silicon valley. We have a parent company back east who saw fit to send one
of their CS400E's out here (they had 4, but now have 3) to add to the list of
equipment that we started out with.

     This is the first occasion I've had to work with one of these machines,
most other companies that I've worked at dealt with the PTH in a slide or push
line, or with auto-insertion equipment like universal...still needed a slide
line for the connectors and what-not though.

     This Contact machine is a neat concept, it presents the parts and points
where things are supposed to go, and it cuts and clinches, but the thing is
FRIGGEN SLOW! We do a little telecommunication board that's completely PTH and
comes in a 30-up panel, that takes around an hour, to an hour 15-mins. on the
locator to get stuffed. We get these boards in 1,000 piece kits which take
close to a week (40-hours) to stuff. If any of you know how competitive it is
here in silicon valley, you know that if you take a week to turn something
around, you're choking in everybody's dust.

     My problem is with management. It seems that because that boat anchor was
shipped out here, we HAVE to use it! Before we got the thing up and running,
we ran a few of the 1,000 piece kits...in three days! That's stuffed, waved,
and shipped. I don't have a real slide line, but I bought some used trays and
lined them with conductive foam then set two work tables end-to-end to create
a sorta "quasi" slide line. Made me some good visual aids and set-up 4
"stations". But for some reason, there's those that feel that what I'm doing
is "primitive".

     Don't get me wrong, I think that the Contact is a neat machine, and if I
had 3 or 4 more I might feel a little differently, but only having one and
forcing us to run ALL our PTH through it is a big mistake in my opinion. I
think it slows us down way too much and because of that any benefit that it
might provide is overshadowed by it's lack of speed and efficiency.

     Does anybody else share my view? Or am I missing something?

Thanks!

-Steve Gregory-

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