WORKING GERBERS

[pcbguy1927]

I just asked our board house for past working gerbers for board they are building for us. They told be NO and that they are proprietary. The past PCB guy never asked for any.
Anyone ever have this issue? I think they are afraid we are moving the boards. Don't most of you asked for working gerber before you allow them to build boards?

Thanks,
John W

[Rerouter]

While I have never had a board house design things for me before, If you paid them to design it, then they have already made there money and should release it,

If you did not pay them or some conditional agreement as part of producing the boards, then they do not have to release them

[pcbguy1927]

Reroute. We did the designs. Taking about a board fabricator. Sorry for the confusion.

[Rerouter]

If you designed it, why would you not have access to the gerbers? is this something like PCBexpress's services,

If you want to see if they modified anything from your original gerbers, board makers like allpcb do let you download the copy, and I suppose it would be up to the manufacturer as I believe many of these companies act as middlemen to prepare you files to best suit the bigger bulk manufacturers.

[greenpossum]

Are you asking them for the gerbers for boards you have sent to them in the past? Some fabs have links to the zip or rar in the past orders section. And do you not have your own archive?

[pcbguy1927]

Just to be clearer. I not am talking about their fabrication panel gerbers. I am asking files that represent our assembly pane. The files that represent that the will be supplying to us. Could also use to order a stencil off of.

John W

[Pseudobyte]

I am not sure what your issue is. Just tell them you will go elsewhere if they don't supply the files.

We require all of our FAB vendors to send us a checkplot of their post processes CAM files. We then check their CAM against our originals to ensure that what they are producing does not change FFF of our designs.

I have had vendors remove silkscreen, inner layer pads on through hole stacks, etc.

[TomS_]

I am asking files that represent our assembly pane.

If they panellised for you, maybe they dont want to supply you with the panellised design incase you take it elsewhere and have someone else manufacture it. Thats about the best thing I can think of in that case.

If you have somehow lost the original design, you could try a little  , saying you need to cross check the design that has been sent with some internal variation to see if the design being manufactured is correct, or something like that.

[Mattylad]

Seems someone is forgetting who the customer actually is here.
Find an alternative supplier, let them know you have found them.
Their choice - supply the gerbers to your board or you jump ship for a better service.

Ensure if you do move that the supply of ALL data is in the contract, this includes the single and panelized data.

[Doctorandus_P]

This is a trap for young players.

I will never ever consider to use a "free" pcb program when it only serves to lock me into some vendor's manufacturing capability. This used to be a common practice not too long ago. I vaguely remember some PCB design suite that was "free" to use, as long as you used "their" manufacturing capability, but it at least had an option to buy the Gerber files from them if you wanted them.

10 years forward and KiCad has evolved to such a state that it's more then capable of any but the most complicated boards, and its completely Open Source and therefore free to use, or donate as you see fit compared to how useful it is to your company and if you have budget left. More money does help improvement of KiCad!

That said.
If some company refuses to give you the Gerbers of your own design I would completely ditch that company for any future projects, just out of principle. I refuse to be held hostage, and redesigning a board (layout) is a small price to pay for my own freedom.
But then again, I never would have fallen into that trap in the first place.

How much effort would it be to re-design your board? Having a bare PCB as a guidance for component placement and track routing can be a big step to reduce the reverse engineering effort, especially with 2 layer designs. If you have 4 or more layers it becomes more difficult.

Here are some pointers for reverse engineering a PCB.
https://hackaday.com/?s=pcb+reverse+engineer

Some of the techniques used are flatbed scanners to scan pcb tracks with minimal distortion.
Sanding off PCB's to expose multi layer copper for scanning all layers.
Making high resolution photographs and layers with Gimp (photoshop, etc) and use different layers and transparency to check connections.

[Wilksey]

This is confusing,

Did you / your company design the PCB and supply the PCB files (Gerbers) and are wanting the fabricator to send you the panel Gerber that they would have produced?  If so why, any other fabricator will panelise for you.
Or are you asking for Gerbers after they had designed something for you? (Already answered here TLDR; if you paid for design they are yours if you had a manufacturing agreement then they can withhold them).

Your "clear" isn't very clear.