In an effort to deliver truly meaningful and comprehensive content, I will write a few articles about pick and place machines and SMT assembly, after many months of trial and error with various methods, in hope to help others who may want/need to get into SMT equipment and assembly. The focus will be on pick and place machines, my observations, what I learned in my prolonged research into pick and place machines over the last year, what some people say, what some companies end up choosing and why, what to look for, what to run away from, etc.
I first saw the article about the Quad IVc pick and place on Ohararp.com and was curious to see this machine up close.
We visited PPM (Precision Placement Machines) some time ago and was able capture a few of the cool things we’ve seen there. This video shows a demo run and feeder setup on a Quad 4000c (Quad IVc upgraded to Windows 7).
I really took a long look at this machine and that’s why I took a day off to go out there (they are truly out in the country). Unfortunately there aren’t many resources on the web about these machines, at least not high quality pictures or videos, so I hope this will change that at least a little bit. The visit was very much worth it and the great staff showed us around and throughout the PPM facility. There’s too much to say about the visit and I hope to make some time to post more pictures later so here are a few more photos of the tour. Later I will expand on our observations on the Quad pick and place.
For now I will just post this video showing the Quad 4000c in action. It illustrates how the machine dispenses paste, places a range of components and finally how a feeder is setup:
That seems incredibly ineffecient. I get that having one machine do it all is nice, but if one is a P&P assembler, it would only makes sense in my mind to have a paste dispenser, followed by a multiheaded P&P machine, followed by a reflow oven.
Pingback: PPM visit and Quad IVc/4000c pick and place demo #manufacturing « adafruit industries blog