Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1419905
OCTOBER 2021 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 49 out, and you know what you need to replace. What other priorities are you looking at? Is it a bottleneck in your shop? A cycle time reduc- tion? Increased yield? How do you prioritize the importance there? Bigelow: I think there's always a bottleneck. Once I had a consultant who said that what they found fascinating about circuit board fab- ricators was that there was always a bottleneck, and it was never the same; the bottleneck is like a bubble; it kind of moves through. But, case in point, a few years ago, it became apparent that we were doing a lot more first article inspec- tions (FAIs) than we'd ever done before. It was a growing trend. We realized we had to beef up our inspection area and the physical layout, as well as the equipment. We spent some money on CMM equipment, additional scopes, differ- ent types of computer soware, and so forth. It was more like we identified a potential bot- tleneck that was soon going to really be a prob- lem. en we looked at other areas. In the wet process area, there are a few things we have on the list of things we want to do. ey would add capacity, yes, but will also add capability. When we invested in the DI, that was an interesting issue. Our photoplotter was dying and that was going to be a couple hundred thousand dollars to replace. But we also knew that the strength of this company was we could plate anything; and we do so. We can press anything. We're very good at mixing materi- als and shrink factors, but the weak link was our old registration equipment. at was the case where the DI was going to be a lot more expensive but appeared to be the direction we needed to go. We bit the bullet, put in a direct imaging system, and it was a phenome- nal game changer in efficiency and time reduc- tion; obviously, the level of accuracy and qual- ity would improve so registration is our strong suit now. at one was strategic. We had to do some- thing because of replacement but decided to leapfrog forward and get ourselves in a better position. I think there are probably a few other areas where we could do that as well; the tech- nology is improving to a point where instead of doing what you did before, maybe go further. I look at our press; we have a fine press but look- ing forward I would really like something that could go maybe 80 or 90 degrees hotter so it could run some materials we can't run today. at's one where it's not high priority. It's on the B list, if you will. But when the time comes, it's going to probably be a radically different system than we have today because I want to be able to run materials we currently can't or that we have difficulty running at the current max of the system we have. Matties: Have you considered an induction press? Bigelow: We're thinking about where we need to understand how that works with PTFE materials and so on because that's the bulk of what we do. ere's a lot of homework we have to do up front on what kind of press it is. Everyone's paradigm seems to be FR-4 and the variants of FR-4, yet we run very little of that. When we run it, it's oen with another mate- rial so that's where we need to spend a little more time doing some homework on that. But we may go that direction. It's one of the tech- nologies we're looking at. Matties: By bringing in direct imaging, the DI system, you eliminated many process steps by doing that, so your cycle time certainly decreased in that regard. When you looked at that and you totaled the savings, did that inspire you to look for other technologies, for example, inkjet solder mask? Bigelow: We never planned on savings. Every- one said we'd save some money and we always kind of figured, "Yeah, sure." It was a savings. I think that opened our eyes to the fact that there are places where you can make that kind of a change and get a lot of collateral benefit. We