Product category:
PCB Assembly Equipment and Tools
News Release from: Blundell Production Equipment
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 26 April 2007
Display company expansion is big
business
A turnkey package of PCB production equipment supplied to Hanover Displays, of Lewes, East Sussex, is one of the largest contracts in Blundell's history.
Blundell Production Equipment has supplied Hanover Displays, of Lewes, East Sussex, with one of the largest packages of PCB production machinery in the company's history Hanover manufactures passenger information systems for buses, trains and fixed installations
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 13 Apr 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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Transport For London recently awarded Hanover a big contract to supply 13,000 electronic signs over an 18 month period, which necessitated a 30% increase in Hanover's production capacity at its Lewes factory.
An investment of around GBP 1 million was approved to upgrade their building and install new production equipment.
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To boost capacity, Hanover installed a line of three i-Pulse SMT placement machines from Blundell.
With the help of Blundell engineers, the company created a fixed feeder setup for its standard range of PCBs.
Feeders are mounted on plug-in trolley, so there is virtually no changeover time between standard PCB types.
The placement line is fully automatic, incorporating board loading, unloading and linking conveyors supplied by Nutek, which worked closely with Blundell on this project.
Reflow soldering is on an Ersa Hotflow 2/14 convection oven, also supplied by Blundell.
"The Hotflow is very economical as well as providing us with an incredibly controllable heating profile", says Steve Aplin, Hanover's Manufacturing Manager.
"We needed a big oven to handle the output from three placement machines, and the Ersa Hotflow copes extremely well", he adds.
Some of Hanover's LED module boards have through-hole components on both sides.
The Ersa Versaflow was chosen for selective soldering of these PCBs, which were previously hand soldered.
"Hand soldering took 20 minutes per board, now, the Versaflow does the same job in just 3 minutes", says Aplin.
"Another advantage of the Versaflow is that the solder flows well up the holes, this was difficult to achieve with hand soldering".
Wave soldering is still an important part of Hanover's production operation, and the company has three Blundell CMS 400 wave soldering machines, all of them lead free compatible.
Two of the machines were bought new, the third was an older machine which Blundell converted to lead free by fitting a new solder bath.
"We didn't have any problems with the change to lead free", says Aplin: "the changeover was quite straightforward".
Aplin concludes: "We have bought equipment from Blundell for a number of years, and have always been very happy with the service".
"We like their way of doing business, so when it came to spending half a million pounds on production equipment, we felt very confident giving that business to Blundell".
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