In the last few months there seems to have been a step change in the price/performance of hobbyist and semi pro pick and place machines such as the Charmhigh CHMT36VA, CHMT48VB, Neoden 3V, and the Qihe TVM802A and TVM802B, offering various numbers of drag feeders for ~$3000-6000 and the "next class up" machines CHMT530P4, CHMT560P4, TVM925 etc (I've probably missed a few variants) which use Yamaha air-powered feeders and 4 heads for ~$6000-9000 (plus feeders). All of the above are faster than anyone really needs and use up-looking cameras to achieve very good placement down to 0402.
So, a simple question: Am I right in thinking none of these machines allow you to quickly swap out an entire bank of reels like a production machine allows, i.e., it is very time consuming to swap between runs of boards that have vastly different sets of components because every reel must be changed one by one and carefully checked that none got mixed up in this process? This seems a shame. I can see why a bank swap would be tricky for the drag style ones since the drag guides are part of the machine, not the reel holder, so are always going to be a fiddly thing to set up. But surely for the "next class up" it would have been easy to allow the frame that the bank of Yamaha feeders clamps to be removable from the machine by, say, undoing 4 bolts? Has anybody tried a mod like this?
The application I have in mind is using it in a service environment for doing semi-regular short runs for small or hobby customers where your larger commercial machines are busy on large jobs but a small machine like those above could be set up within minutes using a custom bank of reels for that particular board which sit in storage between runs. This would allow an agile just-in-time service for your customer instead of them having to commit to large runs for slow-selling product lines or lines under rapid test/development cycles and they could even do minor changes between runs for little or no cost such as change a couple of components (just add those reels to the bank) or a run of a low-spec version of the product where some components aren't placed (leave the reels on the bank anyway).