2 months from dead start to 1000 boards completed? OK, now I know you are nuts!
Probably! But, I am committed and I have no choice but to make it work Even if it takes 3 months that's not the end of the world. But yes it will be a crazy amount of work. All I know is if I lose the drive and chicken out I will regret it forever.
The ducting and power should be in place before the machines arrive. I should be getting a dedicated 100-200A 3-phase breaker. Air conditioning, well yes that may be a challenge. It's solvable.
Getting the printer to run is what I am most worried about. I am putting faith in the guys at K&S that they can train me well in a week, and I think with the training I can manually program the board in another week even without the proper CAD format conversion tools.
Thankfully none of the parts on this board are too challenging. All standard components, no passives smaller than 0603. There is that 8-WSON 3x3mm buck converter. Aside from that and the PCB assembly that will be installed by the PnP, all should be standard footprints.
Don't forget the through-hole PSU assembly that I will need to hand solder.
I am confident I can install a panel's worth in <5 minutes however. To date I have never had an obvious defect just doing hand stenciling, hand assembly, and toaster reflow. Even with lead-free BGA. Knock on wood...I know it's different when you're running thousands of boards but I hope that at least that means my stencil apertures are decent. I've had tombstoning issues doing lead-free but only with 0201s on a particular board. Probably due to the hand-stenciling and placement more than the oven. I have even done wafer-level and microBGA by hand successfully, and I have to imagine that the results
should be more consistent with a proper reflow oven but as you say profiling may be a challenge.
Don't get me wrong I am not brushing off these issues. I'm expecting many issues to pop up but I have to believe I will solve them in time.
For the panels, with a 9 array panel that's about 650 components per panel. With a somewhat conservative placement rate of 5k that comes out to ~8 minutes per panel to place.
A lot of these questions and issues I simply won't properly understand or have answers to until I do it, but I feel ready for it. I know that sounds like hopeless naivety to many of you and I'm 100% sure I would say the same. Nevertheless I am excited for the challenge.
Speaking of naivety, what exactly is involved in setting up a stencil? Aside from software. As far as registration I would think that if the stencil works properly and can recognize fiducials on the board and stencil, alignment *should* be taken care of. That leaves paste selection, print angle/speed, aperture design, and stencil quality.
Hey if you really want a laugh, here is the "loading dock" that will need to be used...
http://imgur.com/a/2hjc2Once inside the hallway is concrete floor, ~12 feet wide. Old industrial machine shop used for heavy machinery. Will be a game of tetris all the same...