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SMT Heads for the Mountains
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
SMT Magazine visits Photo Stencil, a stencil manufacturer in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Founded in 1979, Photo Stencil provides high-performance stencils and tooling for the SMT assembly industry. Nineteen years later, the company acquired the AMTX E-Fab electroformed stencils patent from Xerox for use in the SMT industry. ISO 9001:2000-certified Photo Stencil has additional facilities and support in Guadalajara, Mexico; Brazil; and Penang, Malaysia. The company offers customers in today/out tomorrow turnaround times. Pictured at left, Michelle Boisvert and Gail Flower of SMT Magazine are welcomed by hosts Larry Heitz, CEO and Mike Burgess, vice president.
In addition to AMTX stencils, the company manufactures laser-cut and chem-etch stencils that can be combined to create multilevel or stepped formats. Most common stencil sizes purchased by customers are those mounted in 20" x 20" or 29" x 29" frames, but custom frame sizes down to 5" x 7" are available. Complex stencils are commonplace such as a specialized government/military application, which features multiple steps and a raised center portion with apertures in close proximity to the step. Photo Stencil produced a custom-notched blade for printing this application.
Photo Stencil also offers stencil-related services, including a line of post-processing methods meant to boost print quality and solder past transfer; squeegee blades; screens; and assembly tools, including universal and selective wave solder pallets, SMT process carriers, press fit connector tooling, and packaging and repair tools for solder sphere replacement in BGA and microBGA applications. Photo Stencil holds a total of six patents for its stencil and blade technologies.
Manufacturing an AMTX stencil from start to finish takes about six hours. Photo Stencil produces about 70-90 stencils a day, with capacity upward of 150 stencils a day. The company runs 24 hours a day, six days a week, and monitors work flow/capacity with its order tracking system.
QUICK FACTS:
Photo Stencil was founded in 1979 to provide stencils and tooling for the SMT assembly industry. The company moved its Colorado Springs headquarters to a 75,000-square-foot facility in 1999. Using Valor Computerized Systems’ computer-aided design (CAD) software, Photo Stencil can manage an infinite number of customer stencil footprints, with 6,700 developed to date. This list is growing by about 1,000 parts a year, notes Bill Coleman, Ph.D., vp of technology. Here, Coleman stands beside an example of the AMTX electroformed stencil.
MORE AT SMTMAG.COM
Photo Stencil has a full-time chemist at the facility that pulls samples from tanks on a regular basis. Chemist Barbara Myers monitors about 40 tanks based on a predetermined sampling scheduled to establish replenishment requirements to keep wet chemistry processes running at their optimum performance.
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Corey Holda (l) is responsible for wet chemistries and the AMTX process. Here, he holds up a developed stencil foil. Ricki Hope (r) applies adhesive to precisely tensioned mesh, bonding it to stencil frames.