Hi, I have been asked to do a presentation on scoring to my fellow PCB designers. I have been though the Technet archives and obtained a lot of very useful information. However I have some questions. Could anyone explain the cost savings of scoring. I understand the panel utilisation issues but would this not be offset to some extent by the following? 1a. Surely all PCBs must go though a routing stage, as the array is routed out of the board vendor's panel. Does scoring not add an additional process to the board fabrication? 1b. Also the scoring process can only be done 1 up, whereas routing can be done 2 or 3 up. Am I correct in assuming this? 1c. Do some PCB manufacturers use their CNC router as the scoring machine? Also: 2. Can the scoring lines be run non perpendicularly to the edges of the array? eg. produce a trapezoidal shape? 3. Would you agree that there are less stresses applied to SMD components when mechanical depanelisation is used on a scored array (Pizza cutter), than when an array with routed tabs is manually broken out. 4. I have also heard of a process that just uses a pointer to score the array. Can anyone verify this? Regards, Steve Kingdon PCB Designer Tait Electronics Ltd [log in to unmask] ################################################################ TechNet E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TechNet <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TechNet ################################################################ Please visit IPC's web site (http://www.ipc.org) "On-Line Services" section for additional information. For technical support contact Hugo Scaramuzza at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.312 ################################################################