PCB Manufacturer Recommendations

[wraper]

What are you soldering with, a red hot scalpel? At work, we've had hundreds of boards made by JLCPCB, and solder mask durability has not been an issue at all — and this is at a vocational training center, where some of the apprentices are, well, less skilled than others and end up being a bit rough...

I like JLC also. I got some smaller boards from them that didn't need to be thicker than 1.6mm. They were very fast, and I like their ordering process / status updates. It was a much better experience than what I'm going through with wellpcb right now. Much better quality control too. Muuuuuuuuuuch better.

Sorry, but it's a complete nonsense and BS. JLC quality control sucks. I often see scratches or fingerprints embedded in solder mask. Had PCB with several tracks broken too. Solderability sucks for both Lead-free HASL and ENIG, the worst I've seen. Not every good solder wire or solder paste works on them acceptably, needs to contain quite active flux to decently cover pads and flow into holes. Probably you'll be fine with leaded solder paste and solder wire as they flow way better than lead-free. From wellpcb the only bad thing I've seen were occasional scratches.

[KungFuJosh]

Sorry, but it's a complete nonsense and BS. JLC quality control sucks. I often see scratches or fingerprints embedded in solder mask. Had PCB with several tracks broken too. Solderability sucks for both Lead-free HASL and ENIG, the worst I've seen. Not every good solder wire or solder paste works on them acceptably, needs to contain quite active flux to decently cover pads and flow into holes. Probably you'll be fine with leaded solder paste and solder wire as they flow way better than lead-free. From wellpcb the only bad thing I've seen were occasional scratches.

No, not nonsense or BS, a very different experience than yours. My boards from JLC were excellent. Great solder mask (I tried burning it, I couldn't within any reasonable amount of time). Great ENIG solderability, great hole tolerances, symmetry, etc...

Solderability on the boards I got from wellpcb seems fine, but the quality of craftsmanship is mediocre. The holes aren't ROUND, they're not symmetrical, they're not the same sizes on the same components, the holes aren't even centered on half the pads! .6mm and .54mm leads won't fit into .8mm holes. +/-0.075mm is their tolerance. Last I checked, that's still bigger than those leads.

I'm going to give them a chance to make it right, but so far I have little confidence in seeing that happen. I hope they do.

[asmi]

What are you soldering with, a red hot scalpel? At work, we've had hundreds of boards made by JLCPCB, and solder mask durability has not been an issue at all — and this is at a vocational training center, where some of the apprentices are, well, less skilled than others and end up being a bit rough...

I suggest you reduce you temper a bit. I solder with Pace ADS200, one the best soldering irons out there. And JLCPCB quality has always been a lottery for me - sometimes it more-or-less good, other times it totally sucks. And that is with 4 layer boards as it's been a while since I used 2 layer boards.

[asmi]

No, not nonsense or BS, a very different experience than yours. My boards from JLC were excellent. Great solder mask (I tried burning it, I couldn't within any reasonable amount of time). Great ENIG solderability, great hole tolerances, symmetry, etc...

Yes it is BS. Non-uniform quality is worse than constantly-mediocre one because you never know what are you gonna get.

Solderability on the boards I got from wellpcb seems fine, but the quality of craftsmanship is mediocre. The holes aren't ROUND, they're not symmetrical, they're not the same sizes on the same components, the holes aren't even centered on half the pads! .6mm and .54mm leads won't fit into .8mm holes. +/-0.075mm is their tolerance. Last I checked, that's still bigger than those leads.

I'm going to give them a chance to make it right, but so far I have little confidence in seeing that happen. I hope they do.

I've done well over 50 orders with WellPCB, 2, 4 and 6 layer ones, and every single one so far has been perfect. And we're talking about the boards with DDR3, 1.5 Gpbs HDMI and 5 Gbps USB 3.0 interfaces, which are very picky about the quality of the board (and require controlled impedance). So I don't know what happened in your case, but the story sounds very suspect as it goes contrary to my own experience over last 3 years.

[KungFuJosh]

No, not nonsense or BS, a very different experience than yours. My boards from JLC were excellent. Great solder mask (I tried burning it, I couldn't within any reasonable amount of time). Great ENIG solderability, great hole tolerances, symmetry, etc...

Yes it is BS. Non-uniform quality is worse than constantly-mediocre one because you never know what are you gonna get.

Solderability on the boards I got from wellpcb seems fine, but the quality of craftsmanship is mediocre. The holes aren't ROUND, they're not symmetrical, they're not the same sizes on the same components, the holes aren't even centered on half the pads! .6mm and .54mm leads won't fit into .8mm holes. +/-0.075mm is their tolerance. Last I checked, that's still bigger than those leads.

I'm going to give them a chance to make it right, but so far I have little confidence in seeing that happen. I hope they do.

I've done well over 50 orders with WellPCB, 2, 4 and 6 layer ones, and every single one so far has been perfect. And we're talking about the boards with DDR3, 1.5 Gpbs HDMI and 5 Gbps USB 3.0 interfaces, which are very picky about the quality of the board (and require controlled impedance). So I don't know what happened in your case, but the story sounds very suspect as it goes contrary to my own experience over last 3 years.

Good for you?

I'm not sure if this makes sense to you or not, but you could have 1000 good orders with them, and that doesn't make my bad order with them any better. My experience with wellpcb is bad so far. I'm going to give them the opportunity to change that, as I said. But that doesn't change the fact that 1. they had to remake my order because their tech screwed up (before they ever shipped anything to me, delaying my order a couple weeks), and 2. the replacement order is still bad.

[phil from seattle]

I've used a number of vendors over they years and have yet to find one that has been 100% rock solid. Most recently, I have been using JLC - approximately 400 boards spread over about 25 orders.  Their quality is definitely variable. On some boards the via annular rings were very clearly not concentric with the holes. Their solder masks are sometimes sloppy. Their plating of THs is variable, sometimes pretty darn thick. I have gotten boards where the solder mask burns off. Let us not forget the rotated octagonal pads. But on the whole I will keep using them because none of those issues have meant an unusable or unsaleable board.  And the price is right.

Also, they seem to be trying to improve.  I've noticed lately that their HASL quality is much better - almost mirror like.

[tooki]

What are you soldering with, a red hot scalpel? At work, we've had hundreds of boards made by JLCPCB, and solder mask durability has not been an issue at all — and this is at a vocational training center, where some of the apprentices are, well, less skilled than others and end up being a bit rough...

I like JLC also. I got some smaller boards from them that didn't need to be thicker than 1.6mm. They were very fast, and I like their ordering process / status updates. It was a much better experience than what I'm going through with wellpcb right now. Much better quality control too. Muuuuuuuuuuch better.

Sorry, but it's a complete nonsense and BS. JLC quality control sucks. I often see scratches or fingerprints embedded in solder mask. Had PCB with several tracks broken too. Solderability sucks for both Lead-free HASL and ENIG, the worst I've seen. Not every good solder wire or solder paste works on them acceptably, needs to contain quite active flux to decently cover pads and flow into holes. Probably you'll be fine with leaded solder paste and solder wire as they flow way better than lead-free. From wellpcb the only bad thing I've seen were occasional scratches.

We have yet to encounter a bad PCB from JLCPCB, nor have we had any solderability issues, whether with HASL, lead-free HASL, or ENIG. We use lead free solder. No problems with low-temp lead-free (SnBi) solder paste, whose flux is less active, either.

I’m not saying your experiences didn’t happen, just that they are NOT the norm, and that it’s not “BS” when someone didn’t have the same bad experiences as you.

What are you soldering with, a red hot scalpel? At work, we've had hundreds of boards made by JLCPCB, and solder mask durability has not been an issue at all — and this is at a vocational training center, where some of the apprentices are, well, less skilled than others and end up being a bit rough...

I suggest you reduce you temper a bit. I solder with Pace ADS200, one the best soldering irons out there. And JLCPCB quality has always been a lottery for me - sometimes it more-or-less good, other times it totally sucks. And that is with 4 layer boards as it's been a while since I used 2 layer boards.

Temper? Where’d you see anger? Sarcasm, yes. Anger, no.

Regardless, I guess you didn’t understand my comment anyway. It wasn’t a critique of your soldering iron, but rather of whether you were using a very, very high temperature.

[wraper]

We have yet to encounter a bad PCB from JLCPCB, nor have we had any solderability issues, whether with HASL, lead-free HASL, or ENIG. We use lead free solder. No problems with low-temp lead-free (SnBi) solder paste, whose flux is less active, either.

Say their ENIG does not work well with Loctite GC10 solder paste. Some boards are worse than other. Solder tend not wet the whole pad but concentrate towards component terminal. Worse than what you would expect from OSP. Soldering with SnCu0.7 solder solder wire sucks as well it just does not want to flow decently. You can solder but it flows slowly. SAC305 with a bit activ-ish flux works well. The same solder worked excellently on boards from other suppliers. Lead free HASL is several times worse. Haven't seen any batch that would solder really well. Some boards okay-ish but other from the same batch really suck. Low price and production speed are the only good things about them IMHO.

No problems with low-temp lead-free (SnBi) solder paste, whose flux is less active, either.

It depends on solder alloy a lot, besides flux. Some alloys wet better/flow faster than others. I don't use SnBi so have no idea how well it flows. But SnPb runs circles around SAC, and especially SnCu in this regard.

[tooki]

We have yet to encounter a bad PCB from JLCPCB, nor have we had any solderability issues, whether with HASL, lead-free HASL, or ENIG. We use lead free solder. No problems with low-temp lead-free (SnBi) solder paste, whose flux is less active, either.

Say their ENIG does not work well with Loctite GC10 solder paste. Some boards are worse than other. Solder tend not wet the whole pad but concentrate towards component terminal. Worse than what you would expect from OSP. Soldering with SnCu0.7 solder solder wire sucks as well it just does not want to flow decently. You can solder but it flows slowly. SAC305 with a bit activ-ish flux works well. The same solder worked excellently on boards from other suppliers. Lead free HASL is several times worse. Haven't seen any batch that would solder really well. Some boards okay-ish but other from the same butch really suck. Low price and production speed are the only good things about them IMHO.

Well, repeating your experiences doesn’t change that I (and gazillions of others) haven’t had any of those problems.

As I said, at work, we’ve ordered hundreds of boards from them in the past year, in leaded and Pb-free HASL as well as ENIG, and none have given us any trouble. We’ve used SAC305, SnCu0.7, Sn63Pb37, and Sn42/Bi57.6/Ag0.4. Board solderability just hasn’t been a problem whatsoever.

The only thing I’ve found JLCPCB to be somewhat unpredictable about is silkscreen sharpness. Some batches had visibly lower resolution silkscreen than other batches, even when ordered and shipped together. (I would chalk the difference up to true silkscreening vs inkjet, but I don’t think any of our board orders was big enough that it would have gotten true silkscreening.) Not a problem except for absolutely tiny text well under 1mm tall.

No problems with low-temp lead-free (SnBi) solder paste, whose flux is less active, either.

It depends on solder alloy a lot, besides flux. Some alloys wet better/flow faster than others. I don't use SnBi so have no idea how well it flows. But SnPb runs circles around SAC, and especially SnCu in this regard.

That’s all true, generally speaking. But mine wasn’t a comment about Pb-free low-temp solder in general, but about its compatibility with JLCPCB boards. In that, it performed just as well as leaded, despite the lower temperature meaning that the flux isn’t as active.

[wraper]

Well, repeating your experiences doesn’t change that I (and gazillions of others) haven’t had any of those problems.

Someone had seen it as well, do not remember who. As to why people don't see this. Either they do not inspect under microscope, don't care or do not use lead-free solder.

[wraper]

In that, it performed just as well as leaded, despite the lower temperature meaning that the flux isn’t as active.

Flux is made for certain working temperature. Lower temperature does not mean less active flux or that it will work better at higher temperature.

[tooki]

Well, repeating your experiences doesn’t change that I (and gazillions of others) haven’t had any of those problems.

Someone had seen it as well, do not remember who. As to why people don't see this. Either they do not inspect under microscope, don't care or do not use lead-free solder.

We do care, we do use lead-free, and we do inspect under a stereo microscope. (It’s education, so we have to inspect each student’s work.)

[asmi]

Regardless, I guess you didn’t understand my comment anyway. It wasn’t a critique of your soldering iron, but rather of whether you were using a very, very high temperature.

Well the same exact iron temperature works just fine with any other board, except some from JLCPCB. WellPCB's solder mask is especially durable - it's not easy to scratch it off even when I intend to do so.

[tooki]

Regardless, I guess you didn’t understand my comment anyway. It wasn’t a critique of your soldering iron, but rather of whether you were using a very, very high temperature.

Well the same exact iron temperature works just fine with any other board, except some from JLCPCB. WellPCB's solder mask is especially durable - it's not easy to scratch it off even when I intend to do so.

Well that’s the thing — that’s exactly how our JLCPCB boards have been: durable solder mask. (We have boards with intentional mistakes so students learn to do bodges, including exposing a bit of trace to solder on a bodge. If anything, they have trouble removing the solder mask!)

[NorthGuy]

We have boards with intentional mistakes so students learn to do bodges, including exposing a bit of trace to solder on a bodge.

Brilliant idea 

[tooki]

We have boards with intentional mistakes so students learn to do bodges, including exposing a bit of trace to solder on a bodge.

Brilliant idea 

And sometimes we accidentally add bonus errors that need fixing, too! 

I work at a vocational training center. Apprentices (employed elsewhere) go to school for the theory, and to us a couple of weeks a year for hands-on training. Over the course of the 4-year apprenticeship, they do hands-on classes on assembly (soldering, crimping, wiring, rudimentary metalworking, etc), “measurement” (using meters, scopes, and generators to do things like I-V curves, Bode plots of RC filters, transistor circuits, series/parallel resistance, digital logic, etc), C programming, hardware troubleshooting, and various others.

As an American (where vocations have been neglected for decades) I continue to be impressed by the Swiss apprenticeship system. The electronics apprenticeship program is quite rigorous.

[KungFuJosh]

It looks like wellpcb is going to try and make this right. I sent the design back with oversized holes so it shouldn't be an issue. Remaking the boards may get delayed by Chinese New Year, but they said they'll try and expedite them.

[KungFuJosh]

I got the replacements, and so far, they look great. I've also received a second order from JLC, and I like both companies. JLC seems to cost less, and still make good stuff. I'll keep using both companies until one of them pisses me off. lol

[MWP]

Thumbs down for WellPCB.
I paid the extra for 48hr express service, it's now been 10 days and the boards havent been posted yet.
Very limited communication too. Ive had to ask for updates every step of the way (I didnt even get a order confirmation email).
 

[48X24X48X]

China had their labor Day and Ching Ming festival holidays early in the month. If you place order around that period, pending orders will be even more.

[KE5FX]

China had their labor Day and Ching Ming festival holidays early in the month. If you place order around that period, pending orders will be even more.

I did the same thing a few weeks ago, and they proactively contacted me to let me know the express service wasn't going to be available.  The expedite fee was refunded immediately.  Communication by email was immediate and professional as usual. 

Just another anecdote to add to the pile, but I'm a happy camper.  I've tried many low-cost Asian board houses, and WellPCB is the only one I consider worth sticking with.

[KungFuJosh]

I still like both WellPCB and JLCPCB. I have ordered a bunch more boards from JLC, and I can see the inconsistency in the soldermask durability, but it's still worth it.

Thanks,
Josh

[MWP]

I did the same thing a few weeks ago, and they proactively contacted me to let me know the express service wasn't going to be available.  The expedite fee was refunded immediately.  Communication by email was immediate and professional as usual.

It's strange that my experience has been completely the opposite 
Do you always deal with the same support person? Bella?

[jmelson]

Well, I can't talk about others, but I've been using PCBway a lot lately, and they have done a GREAT job on boards going from easy to 4-layer but with moderate line/space tolerances.  We've had at least a dozen designs run by them.  Some were assembled by hand, most of the larger orders were run on our P&P machine.  All the P&P boards were done with SAC305 solder.

For really demanding boards (6 layer, 5 mil spaces) we have used E-Teknet in Arizona, who owns their fab in China, but has their own QC people on site.  They have done hundreds of board designs for us over the last 20 years or so, with practically zero defects.  We went to PCBway due to the crazy low prices they offer.  We probably will still give our 6-layer boards to E-Teknet.

Jon

[KE5FX]

It's strange that my experience has been completely the opposite 
Do you always deal with the same support person? Bella?

I usually receive email confirmation notices from Emma or Wendy (who I believe works for Emma.)