Favorite small batch assembly houses?

[drwho9437]

I'm thinking mostly jobs of 2-10 units. With stuff like pretty fine pitch BGAs. I can do most things myself but once it gets to fine pitch BGAs I am hit or miss.

What are your favorite places to do small batch work? What sort of inputs do your favorites need to turn the job? (Parts kitting documentation for asm, etc.)

Thanks!

[mazurov]

I like Advanced Assembly. The quality is very good and their DFA is second to none.

They are requesting pretty long length of the tape to feed their machines. Even if you need 2 pieces they may want to buy 10-60 of a component, depending on the component size. Could be frustrating If you're paying your own money. There is no minimum for trays.

[SMTech]

I like Advanced Assembly. The quality is very good and their DFA is second to none.

They are requesting pretty long length of the tape to feed their machines. Even if you need 2 pieces they may want to buy 10-60 of a component, depending on the component size. Could be frustrating If you're paying your own money. There is no minimum for trays.

The trouble is if you don't set these limits as an assembler you could rapidly end up with a job that's 70% manually loaded or worse, which introduces an extra process with chances for error and buckets of time. SMT with automated equipment is basically reliant on production packaging and that typically includes a minimum tape length for the feeder to hold as well as enough for the operator to handle, possibly a leader section of tape and a certain amount of cover tape. On our Essemtec with CLM feeders I'd say anything shorter than 10CM is pretty annoying to handle and that's 50 parts at 2mm pitch, however the chances are those parts are pretty worthless anyway. I'd estimate a job thats cretaed entirely with strips of tape takes at least 3 times longer to prep for loading than one using reels, and longer to unload to unless it was all going straight in the bin.

[dkonigs]

I haven't run a job with them yet, but there's always Small Batch Assembly (https://www.smallbatchassembly.com/). I'm currently planning to use them for my next project, unless I find a reason to use someone else instead.

However, that's for a small "production" run. For a half-dozen to a dozen units, I'd probably just build them by hand.

[48X24X48X]

I haven't run a job with them yet, but there's always Small Batch Assembly (https://www.smallbatchassembly.com/). I'm currently planning to use them for my next project, unless I find a reason to use someone else instead.

However, that's for a small "production" run. For a half-dozen to a dozen units, I'd probably just build them by hand.

Having following him on Twitter, I would recommend him too despite never use his service before.

[drwho9437]

Very good to know about this place, its actually within driving distance of me as well...