Small run PCB fabricators

Hi...i am a new user here. To get rid of Copper adhesion i added some meat to my footprints for that one part  and even those boards were completely usable. I would have never noticed the copper adhesion strength if I wasn't trying to swap out tiny SMD x4 resistor arrays with an old school heavy soldering iron. 

pcb assembly

JardCrocker said:

I would have never noticed the copper adhesion strength if I wasn't trying to swap out tiny SMD x4 resistor arrays with an old school heavy soldering iron.

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Wrong tool. Use a hot-air rework tool.

Andy Peters said:

Wrong tool. Use a hot-air rework tool.

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Um yes... You are responding to a comment I made in jan 2014 (that the poster cut and pasted without attribution)... I have purchased two hot air stations so far (first one died).

I did experience one batch of prototype PCBs from Gold Phoenix back then with inferior copper adhesion. I compared the bare boards to a previous lot from the same vendor and there was a demonstrable difference.  The boards were adequate to serve as prototypes, and I ordered later orders from them with no obvious copper adhesion problem.

I reported it to them but they never acknowledged the problem. They probably were sold a substandard lot of copper clad by some shady vendor (in China) and didn't want to deal with replacing lots of orders. 

I mentioned the association of blown pads with use of an iron as a warning for others. Even with good copper adhesion, small pads will be more sensitive to overheating. 

JR

Thank you for sharing this thread.

My quote was $610 cad for 5-10 CTC Helios Cards.

I am completely fed up with pricing out parts. It may be time for some Strong Bows and Cheap Scotch to purge this injustice.

You can look at pcbshopper.com to do comparison shopping of various places.

john12ax7 said:

You can look at pcbshopper.com to do comparison shopping of various places.

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Thanks John12ax7!

We actually just placed an ordered with Golden Phoenix. Price with delivery, $160 cad for 12 CTC Helios Cards.

I am preparing a small run (one unit) SMD PCB....

I have used dirty and gold phoenix in the past... I might even consider a solder paste mask if cheap enough.

any recent advice?

JR

I use jlcpcb.

Chinese based, but good quality, and cheap as dirt.

Cheers,

Thomas

totoxraymond said:

I use jlcpcb.

Chinese based, but good quality, and cheap as dirt.

Cheers,

Thomas

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Thanks  right now dirty looks cheaper than gold phoenix and actually uses a secure website...  I'll check out JLC

JR

JohnRoberts said:

Thanks  right now dirty looks cheaper than gold phoenix and actually uses a secure website...  I'll check out JLC

JR

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Well i meant cheap as dirt, not cheap as "Dirty pcb". 

5$ for 5 10cm×10cm pcb. Even cheaper for the first 5 of each order.

You still need to add taxes, delivery and duty fees of course, but generally i order 5 or 6 different designs each time and it costs me around 50€ for 25 boards.

And i receive my pcbs in less than a week most of the time (even in covid era).

Hard to beat, really. I'd like to find a factory closer, mostly for environmental reasons. But the price would rise too high for my wallet.

Thomas

totoxraymond said:

Well i meant cheap as dirt, not cheap as "Dirty pcb". 

5$ for 5 10cm×10cm pcb. Even cheaper for the first 5 of each order.

You still need to add taxes, delivery and duty fees of course, but generally i order 5 or 6 different designs each time and it costs me around 50€ for 25 boards.

And i receive my pcbs in less than a week most of the time (even in covid era).

Hard to beat, really. I'd like to find a factory closer, mostly for environmental reasons. But the price would rise too high for my wallet.

Thomas

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Thanx... I ended up going with dirty again... they sell a stencil for $25 that will make assembly easier.

JR