Mike,

Regarding odd-form placement.

This is what we found when we looked at the getting some odd form insertion machines recently.

The evaluation we did is only based on our requirements but I would guess they are very similar to what most other people want -flexibility and speed (throughput).

Firstly we were surprised by how few machines we could find, that may be because we're a little geographically isolated down here in Australia but we did send someone to the USA to have a look at some of the trade shows and they didn't find anything different.

We loooked at the following four machines:

Citizen M6

Citizen M11

Celtronix

Fuji ABA440

What we found is that you have to be prepared to spend lots of money

( I know lots is a relative measure but quarter to half a million in my book is a lot of money) 

Which is split about 50 / 50 between machine and tooling.

The two things we were looking for were flexibility- we wanted to place a range of parts ie relays, large caps, transformers and connectors.  The second was throughput- the machine had to do it quicker than an operator could.

We found that we could not find a machine that met both of our criteria at a reasonable cost (payback period).

The Citizen M6 and M11 were fast enough (0.7-1.2 secs) but did not have enough flexibility it could only insert 60% of the parts we wanted whilst the Celtronix machine was very impressive (vision systems etc) and placed around 80% of the parts its spec'd insertion time was 3 secs. (We manually place at 4-5 secs)

Fuji just didn't seem to want to talk to us but their machine is rated at 2.85 secs.

So Mike I'm sorry but I can't answer any of you other questions because we didn't buy a machine.

I would be very interested to hear from other Tech-netters telling me how wrong we were but at this point in time we may consider buying a dedicated terminal insertion machine and forget about odd-form placement.

Hope this has been helpful      

Stephen Thornton
Engineering Manager Tytronics
12 Circuit Drive Hendon SA 5014
Telephone: +61 (0)8 8268 5400
Fax: +61 (0)8 8268 2503