PCB extra charges out of nowhere?

Hey chaps,

I have all my one-off PCB's done at Gold Phoenix, and have always been really happy with their products.  I normally wait until I've got a few small designs up and ready before I put them together into a single Gerber file and have them sent off to get done under their Special Prices offer - 100sq inches for $89US.  I usually get a few extra of each board thrown in due to the Gerber being smaller than their 100sq inch panel.  They also charge an extra $30 for the Multi Design panel, which I don't mind paying for.  Add the shipping and it's usually $129 - excellent value whichever way you split it.

Recently they've started charging me an extra $20 for "Complex Board Shape (routing points greater than 6)".  My designs are always rectangular in shape, specifically to avoid this extra charge.  When I asked them about it the response was (paraphrasing), "You should've always been charged this fee for your gerbers, due to the fact each board has it's own outline which must be cut from the panel".

Am I missing something here?  Surely the Multi Design panel charge is covering for this?  I would have thought that a Complex Board Shape charge would be something like a octogon-shaped PCB.  I don't really mind paying the extra $20 (it's still excellent value for money for me down here - best local deal I can find for a similar multi-design PCB is over $400), I was more just surprised that this extra charge suddenly appeared.

Should I perhaps be sending them a multi-design gerber with one single board outline around all the designs, and cut the boards up myself?

I've never had that problem with GP.

wierd. Who's your contact? Shane?

Yeah, Shane handles all my orders.  Definitely weird.

I have never understood why so many of the Chinese suppliers have this aversion to multiple designs on a panel.
As long as you are doing the guillotining yourself why do they care if your 100sq" panel is one big monstrosity
or a bunch of lesser sized boards. I really miss Custom PCB in Malaysia who used to not care what was on there so
long as it fell inside the size parameters.
M

mobyd said:

I have never understood why so many of the Chinese suppliers have this aversion to multiple designs on a panel.

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Not just the Chinese, pretty much every PCB fab objects to this. I believe the reasoning is that (a) they prefer to panelize smaller boards themselves so they can have a more even copper distribution on the panels which helps with warping and etching yield and (b) they prefer not to be a back-end for PCB-pooling setups as that doesn't get them as much new customers as when the individual board designers would come to them (and there may be profit issues involved).

As for the cutting charge: personally I find cutting FR4 a major hassle if I don't have access to the right equipment (and it doesn't half dull blades and router bits), so I'd gladly pay the extra fee. On the other hand, this now gives you an excuse to have irregular board patterns like, say, 500-series PCBs.

JDB.
[my last GP order got hit with "orders to Europe must be RoHS", even though I argues that they'd be used in in-house test equipment which is exempt. Maybe (new?) Management has directed Shane to be more to-the-letter-of-the-rules, maybe boneheaded Customs officers have actually intercepted shipments. Who knows.]

I did actually wonder if they're simply trying to boost their profit margin seeing as the US dollar is taking a pummelling at the moment.  However, raising their prices to cover rising costs of production is one thing, tacking on an extra charge without warning is another.

my last GP order got hit with "orders to Europe must be RoHS", even though I argues that they'd be used in in-house test equipment which is exempt. Maybe (new?) Management has directed Shane to be more to-the-letter-of-the-rules, maybe boneheaded Customs officers have actually intercepted shipments. Who knows.

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I'm not sure about "to-the-letter" reasoning - I still would call a panel of 4 different sized rectangular boards, shapes with only 4 routing points each and therefore exempt from their complex routing charge - and it sounds like you've had similar additional charges as well.  Then again, as you say I can now take advantage of boards with odd shapes and cutouts without feeling like I'm trying to be a scrooge.

I find that while GP does absolutely fabulous work, their pricing is very inconsistent, however, as long as I know the price up front, I'm a happy guy.  I have asked several times what I could do with my Gerber layouts to make them more efficient, but I have NEVER gotten a reply.  Just a quote on how many of whatever boards I get per panel, and a dollar figure.  I usually go for the 155 sq, in. deal, and have never been disappointed in their work.
Best,
Bruno2000

I just got a quote from Olimex for some diamond buffer pc boards (in a 2520 footprint) and they hit me with extra charges for non-standard drill size, too many holes per panel, and a Paypal service fee. Then the freight was extra, while Gold Phoenix includes freight in the price. I have not placed the order with Olimex yet...

Isn't the fee for using Paypal against their terms of service?

regards, Jack

So I got my boards from GP the other day (went ahead with the extra $20 anyway), and I'd say something has changed at their end, maybe a different supplier?  The silkscreening wasn't the same quality I'm used to seeing from GP, very blurry and in places fading away.  And they'd silkscreened some kind of 5 digit code onto each of the boards that wasn't in my gerbers.  The tinning on the copper pads looked a bit different too, not shiny, kinda dull, almost like they'd used lead-free solder.

Curtis said:

So I got my boards from GP the other day (went ahead with the extra $20 anyway), and I'd say something has changed at their end, maybe a different supplier?  The silkscreening wasn't the same quality I'm used to seeing from GP, very blurry and in places fading away.  And they'd silkscreened some kind of 5 digit code onto each of the boards that wasn't in my gerbers.  The tinning on the copper pads looked a bit different too, not shiny, kinda dull, almost like they'd used lead-free solder.

Click to expand...

I get dull finish on the GP pc boards when I order the silver plating instead of the standard lead. Maybe that's what you got?

The silkscreen quality does vary but I have never had it come out blurry.

One problem with GP is that you do not get anywhere near the 155 sq in output, unless they add some extra boards.  I sent them a small pcb that had a theoretical yield of 47 pieces, and they came back with 36 count. I complained and they came back with a slightly higher number. Then I asked them to use the panel size that is listed on their web site and eventually got 42 pieces on the quote. They ended up sending me more than 50 when the order was complete...  I guess because I was complaining.

Olimex is not winning my business over. I asked them to modify the quote they sent me and it has been 3 or 4 days with no response. Their customer service is just too dang slow.

regards, Jack

I still get good proto services from pcbcart: http://www.pcbcart.com/

I have started using the 10 day quote instead of the 8 day since they usually miss it anyway. I was told that gold plating usually throws off the schedule.

I just noticed that Gold Phoenix has raised their price for the 155 sq in pcb from $99 to $110. 

-Jack

Increasing labor costs, shipping and the latest hikes in currency value could account for that easily.

I just got in my first proto PCB order from GP (100 sq in for $99), and they look good, not pristine, but fine for my needs. My PCB was 24 sq in and change, and they sent me 5 so I got 1 free based on their 100" price plan (maybe they felt guilty for price increase? Nah.. they probably ran one extra for insurance on their end.).

Significantly cheaper than the US vendor I used before.  So far so good, but I haven't fired these up yet. It's a pretty simple 2 sided design, and I didn't press the limits for traces and spaces (my layout software doesn't go below 10 mil traces anyhow). I could have eliminated a few vias, routing under some tight footprints, but not worth the potential pain. I used to have to work with 20x20 min traces and spaces for in house PCB so this is all high precision to me.

While cheaper would be nice, I have made plenty of single sided PCB in my day, and I wouldn't make these myself even if I could for that price, and I'm pretty frugal.

JR

JohnRoberts said:

While cheaper would be nice, I have made plenty of single sided PCB in my day, and I wouldn't make these myself even if I could for that price, and I'm pretty frugal.

JR

Click to expand...

I used to do all my own single siders until the Peroxide/Hydrochloric fumes ate the chrome off all the fittings in my basement bathroom
and I had to strip out the room including the wall cladding. Then I started thinking about what it was doing to my lungs. A job much better
left to those better equipped. Drilling the holes also gets so much harder with deteriorating eyesight.
M

We (expat audio) use gp for all our proto's.
They almost always overdeliver.

In addition, for production runs, they etest each board to check for shorts and continuity.

A 10% hike in over 5 years isn't really _that_ bad.

re: GP and electrical testing on their website wrt $99 deal. 

GP sez said:

#8. No Electrical Testing for 1-2 layers, maximum 15% fail rate, Free Testing for 4 layers, maximum fail rate 2%

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While I am not expecting problems... I didn't push the limits for traces or spaces.
-------
re: Moby... If you want some serious fun with corrosive etchant, one time back in the '70s we were using a hot plate to make some ferric chloride etch copper faster.  Long story short the glass bowl holding the etchant broke, and the etchant vaporized on the heating element, all exposed metal in the room was instantly oxidized.

I recall looking into bringing 2 sided technology in house in connection with my old day job, even on a pretty large scale we declined. Apparently the heavy lifting involve some carbon deposition steps to give the plated through holes something to plate metal onto. Anybody can make 2 sided boards. The multilayer technology was potentially too dirty, capital intensive, and subject to changing regulations wrt waste generated..

I recall back in the '80s for sport we would bet on which PCB house would go out of business next...  In hindsight not bringing the multilayer technology in house was probably still a good move. 

JR

John,

Let me clarify.

For proto's they don't etest. For my production runs, they do.

Where they get you is the multiproject per panel.

But it's still cheaper and more reliable than other places.

However, the latest numbers I got from customers in China, is that even with so many pcb companies, the average price of 2layer fr4 with silkscreen etc is still around $0.05.

/R

(Having said that, I have customers using fr2, with silver "paste" vias that can only handle 200mA each. Yuck yuck nasty cheap yuck.

Has anybody (else) had trouble with poor copper adhesion?  I started populating a pair of boards from my recent order and already lifted two adjacent pads (on a quad resistor) when I used some solder wick to remove solder (so I could resolder the part). I am using a temp controlled iron, so maybe I need to crank it down a touch, but I have been reworking SMT for years without lifting pads.

I also notice the solder resist comes off very easily.. again using some solder wick to remove bridges from tight pitch ICs, scrapes off wide swaths of the nearby solder mask..

I can live with ugly, but lifting pads that easily makes me nervous...  They spec it as 1oz copper but it seems wimpy to me, the thickness of the copper shouldn't affect the adhesion anyhow.  

I am still early on this batch so hopefully this is an isolated failure.

JR

Edit: I started with the hardest parts first, so today with fresher eyes, and a lighter hand, I have populated all of the difficult parts with no more problems. The rest of the parts to finish are relatively large and/or simple 2 lead parts.

I might consider 2oz copper next time, and the solder mask still seems weak, but these will be usable, and the price was right.

/edit

Have not had trouble with copper adhesion, and I just removed a couple of parts from a pcb that I was testing.  Too much heat will lift the pads on any pcb.  OTOH, I use custom part footprints in Eagle that have larger pads than the common stock selections that come with the program, and this helps with the lifting problem (and makes it easier for my big fingers).

Also, GP does do testing on the prototype orders even though their web page says that they do not...  I occasionally get pc boards that are marked as rejected in some lots I have ordered.

re Olimex:  They shipped me some boards on Nov 23rd and they have not yet arrived... they did not specify how they were sent.  GoldPhoenix uses FedEx and I have never had a problem with shipments.

regards, Jack