Just came back from Shenzhen and managed to visit Huawei Beijing Guochang's branch office in Shenzhen (manufacturer of the SMT550/SMT660/SMT880, Wenzhou YingXing is the legitimate distributor outside of China as clarified by them). It's a tiny office further away from the Shenzhen city center while their factory is in Beijing. Took a Didi (like your Uber and Grab elsewhere in the world) from the nearest metro station for the first time but was going into wrong building (YingXing sales representative gave an image of the large building next to it!
). I was fortunate that a SMT550 has just arrived at this place although it is not being set up yet. And YES, I managed to measure the height of the SMT550
. Without the feet and alarm light, it is around 77.5 cm which gives me around 2.5 cm of margin to go through my 80 cm door. Moving on the machine, it is a very solid and well built machine. Even the bottom is fully enclosed with no dangling and exposed wires. It could do down to 0201 like it's bigger brother SMT660 and SMT880 when the electric feeder (also Yamaha but I'm not sure what series is being used) is being used. It also supports the usual pneumatic Yamaha CL feeder up to 50 8mm. It also has rails and can be cascaded to other machine. Maximum component height is 8 mm. The software is exactly same like the SMT660 and SMT880. So, it's easy to migrate between different sizes of the machines. Here are some shot of the SMT550 (un-powered though).
Rather than running the place solely as a showroom only and collecting dust, they actually run small PCBA services to the local market. There are 2 SMT880, 1 SMT660 and a SMT460 (obsolete and no longer offered and it is surprisingly as huge as the SMT880 and SMT660!). They cascaded a SMT880 and SMT660 in a line together with a semi-automatic stencil printer. They were assembling some ESP32 board that has components down to 0402, SOT-23-6, SOT-23, QFN-48 0.4mm. Throughout my 1 hour there, I took a look at those assembled panels from time to time to see how the placement accuracy fare. They are very accurate and spot on.
I did drop by NEPCON Shenzhen 2019 too on this trip, although machine from ZhengBang are cheaper but it comes with less feeder and belt configuration (ZB3545TP, not published yet on anywhere at this time of writing). ZhengBang used to OEM from Huawei Beijing Guochang for the past few years but starting from 2019, they are on their own. Charmhigh was also there were showcasing their new huge machine (6 and 8 head that uses electronic feeder) which are totally out of my budget and of course that space constraint. Other machines on display are from the regular big boys (Yamaha, Panasonic, Juki, Autronik) are again out of my scope and requirements.
I will probably get the SMT550 to replace my current machine. At USD7500, it definitely has better features than many machine even those priced well above it. Ball screw with pneumatic and electronics feeder, rails. At least, both Huawei Beijing Guochang and YingXing are upfront about their business relationship and that is fine with me. As long I get the proper support, I am more than happy. The flight, visa and accommodation only cost me around USD300 from Malaysia to Shenzhen and I'm glad I took the short trip!