PCB Assembly Costs

Thread Starter

Xavier Pacheco Paulino

Joined Oct 21, 2015
728
Hello,

Does any of you deal with PCB assembly companies? I mean, do you usually assemble the boards by your own, or let a company make it for you? I requested an assembly quotation in a Chinese company (AllPCB) and the unit prices of components are higher than the supplier prices, i.e, mouser or digikey. So the total assembly cost (when they assemble a minimum of 5 sets) is kind of expensive. They say that they purchase from their components factory, which is more reliable and the goods are high quality. When they purchase, the shipping cost and Customs tax will be a little high. So the unit price will be a little high.
 

MaxHeadRoom

Joined Jul 18, 2013
28,619
Are you making these for resale, or just for personal use.
If the latter or just 5 boards then I usually just have the board made, and populate them myself.
relatively cheap.
Max.
 

Thread Starter

Xavier Pacheco Paulino

Joined Oct 21, 2015
728
Are you making these for resale, or just for personal use.
If the latter or just 5 boards then I usually just have the board made, and populate them myself.
relatively cheap.
Max.
It's for personal use. I plan to assemble the through hole components by myself and the SMD components with the company.
 
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mcgyvr

Joined Oct 15, 2009
5,394
Setting up/running a measly 5 PCS ain't going to be cheap even in China..
Not to mention if its parts not in their "standard inventory" then low volume is going to kill you again..

Expect higher prices with custom..
 

jaredwolff

Joined Jul 1, 2017
58
It depends on the tradeoffs you want to make and how many components you have. I self assembled this bad boy and it took me a good long while.

DSC01109.jpg

Would I do it again? Probably not.

I also hand assembled this guy but I purposely made the component sizes larger (>= 0603 instead of 0402) so I could easily assemble without using my microscope. (Plus, the components are plain easier to handle when larger)

DSC01070 2.jpg

I just bought some boards + assembly from Macrofab. (still waiting to get them back) Their prices are reasonable though the lead time is long. It seems lots of these turn key places charge very low prices at the start then 10x their pricing when they realize they're not making money..
 

jaredwolff

Joined Jul 1, 2017
58
Definitely, go for it. You can get cheap stencils from OSH Stencils that makes at least the solder application portion of things muuuuch easier. They sell some acrylic pieces to hold your board in place which I highly recommend using. I just tape them down with a board inside using masking tape or similar.

DSC00556.jpg DSC00561.jpg

(In my picture above I used athletic tape, of all things, to secure everything down. Works just as good!)
 

ebeowulf17

Joined Aug 12, 2014
3,307
Hello,

Does any of you deal with PCB assembly companies? I mean, do you usually assemble the boards by your own, or let a company make it for you? I requested an assembly quotation in a Chinese company (AllPCB) and the unit prices of components are higher than the supplier prices, i.e, mouser or digikey. So the total assembly cost (when they assemble a minimum of 5 sets) is kind of expensive. They say that they purchase from their components factory, which is more reliable and the goods are high quality. When they purchase, the shipping cost and Customs tax will be a little high. So the unit price will be a little high.
I don't remember the exact breakdown now, but I had an assembly job done at allpcb pretty recently and thought it was a good value.

The board was small-ish, around 38mm square if I remember correctly, and all surface mount. We needed a few prototypes to verify a significant redesign I'd just done, but I'm awful at SMT soldering. Prototyping with our local assemblers would've been ~$2000, so l shopped around.

We have production quantities assembled in the Seattle area, 1000 at a time, for about $13-14 each, and 10 prototypes from allpcb cost $400 ($40 each, and only 20% of the local prototyping bids.) The whole process took just under 3 weeks. I thought that getting short run custom work for only 3x our normal production pricing was great!
 

jaredwolff

Joined Jul 1, 2017
58
I don't remember the exact breakdown now, but I had an assembly job done at allpcb pretty recently and thought it was a good value.

The board was small-ish, around 38mm square if I remember correctly, and all surface mount. We needed a few prototypes to verify a significant redesign I'd just done, but I'm awful at SMT soldering. Prototyping with our local assemblers would've been ~$2000, so l shopped around.

We have production quantities assembled in the Seattle area, 1000 at a time, for about $13-14 each, and 10 prototypes from allpcb cost $400 ($40 each, and only 20% of the local prototyping bids.) The whole process took just under 3 weeks. I thought that getting short run custom work for only 3x our normal production pricing was great!
@ebeowulf17 where is allpcb
based?
 

ebeowulf17

Joined Aug 12, 2014
3,307
@ebeowulf17 where is allpcb
based?
Don't remember for sure, but I think it's Shanghai.

Location information is pretty prominent on their website if you're interested in digging deeper. They're really proud of their infrastructure, their shipping capabilities, etc. There were maps with big arrows showing the distances between a few key cities they work in.
 

Thread Starter

Xavier Pacheco Paulino

Joined Oct 21, 2015
728
If ALLPCB assembles my project (5 sets), the components cost is about USD$830. While if I buy my components for 3 sets and assemble them myself, the price drops to USD$175. Not pretty bad.
 

dendad

Joined Feb 20, 2016
4,451
How much SMT is on the board?
I assemble all my boards by hand and it is not too hard.
Originally, I used a magnifying circular lamp but now a Video Presenter.
There are quite a few videos on the net showing how to solder SMT parts.
A couple of my boards....
PCBs.jpg
These have mostly 1206 parts and a few of 0805.
I can manage 0603 but struggle with 0405.
These are soldered with an iron, not a stencil.
Just take your time. I tin one pad and then using tweezers, place the part in position and solder that end. After that, the other end is soldered.
Flux is your friend! Get a syringe of paste flux. It will help those fussy parts. And solder wick to clean up any bridges.
 
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Thread Starter

Xavier Pacheco Paulino

Joined Oct 21, 2015
728
My board generally has 0805, 0603 and 1206 components. Also, some SOIC-8 ICs. The only challenging IC would be this one



Excuse me all of you for this question, but I haven't been able to fully understand the term "stencil". Don't know if it's because English is not my native language. What exactly does it mean? I read that is putting solder past on the footprints?
 

dendad

Joined Feb 20, 2016
4,451
A stencil is a thin sheet of plastic or stainless steel with holes cut in it to fit over the surface mount solder pads. Then solder paste is spread over it, just like silk screen printing for T shirts.
Then the SMT parts are placed onto the board, held on by the solder paste. Next, the board is put into an oven to melt the solder paste and the parts are soldered to the board.
Here is a tutorial. Ben mentions stencils but is not using one. He is using a reflow oven though.
 
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